E-commerce boom creates more jobs for photographers, models

Rasika Mathur remembers the time when she used to gamely double up as a make-up artist while some of her colleagues volunteered as models at e-commerce startup Snapdeal.com. Just a year on, both she and the company have come a long way - she is its full-time corporate communications director while the company has turned to professional models to lure India's rapidly-growing army of online shoppers.

Snapdeal.com, an online retailer that sells everything from clothing to cosmetics to electronic items, now uploads more than 2,000 pictures on its website every day using a 30-member production team of photographers, stylists and make-up artists. Rival Yebhi.com is even busier, with 25 inhouse lensmen shooting about 4,500 pictures a day in eight studios to showcase the company's wares.

Indiatimes.com, which now sources varied content and photographs from vendors, is also planning to hire models in the coming weeks to create its own content as part of a push into fashion. "Since we are aggressively growing into fashion and jewellery, we are actively looking at having our own models. We are already talking to a lot of models to build our own content," says Gautam Sinha, director for technology and e-commerce at Indiatimes. com.

The growth of Indiatimes.com, Snapdeal. com and other e-commerce firms such as Myntra.com, Jabong.com and fashionandyou.com, and this industry's collective desire to make its wares more accessible to shoppers have spawned opportunities for hundreds of youngsters to be online mannequins, giving them a clean source of income and a new career choice in modelling.

According to modelling agencies and online retailers, models are making between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 a day. Already, web firms must be using 100-150 models aday, says Yebhi.com Chief Executive Manmohan Agarwal.

"We used our own staff when we were bootstrapped," says Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal.com's founder and chief executive officer, adding the demand for professional models from firms such as his has spawned a launch pad for young talent. "Most of them are strugglers and part-timers, and through this association they could reach out to other media like television and print," he adds.

Source: http://economictimes.feedsportal.com/fy/8av2Fvy0bq9nt2kM/story01.htm

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