In a world where every second person is an ‘influencer’, how can passionate and creative individuals stand out in a crowd? By relying on a social community, of course! This is what Razia Ali, founder of platforms Blend Community and Blend For Food believes in earnest. A community that began after the pandemic took over our lives, its primary aim was to help food brands revive their business without bleeding themselves dry due to the food aggregators.
“Personally, food, fashion and fiction are my passions, and I noticed that there weren’t any platforms catering to these three themes specifically. I wanted to create one that curates and distributes relevant content in one place. That’s how the idea of creating an online community celebrating and sharing stories around these three specific categories, came about,” says Ali.
The Blend Community is purely an Instagram based platform. It has a variety of content in the genres of food, fashion, and fiction. Blend For Food, on the other hand, is India’s first ‘Content to Commerce Food Tech Platform’ powered by the creator economy. It claims to be a one-stop destination for everything related to food. Ali points out that there a large number of apps catering to different needs like Swiggy/Zomato, Conosh, Masala Box, Amazon Fresh, BigBasket, etc. but through her platform, one can access them on a single destination.
“During the second wave of the pandemic, we shifted the Blend Community’s focus to the health and well-being segment for our audience. We highlighted content around themes such as adopting a healthy lifestyle, keeping your mood upbeat while working from home, keeping yourself entertained and others. We also hosted a variety of live sessions with bakers, as well as live tarot card sessions etc. We did a variety of things to stay relevant to users during the pandemic,” she shares.
The USP of the Blend Community is the fact that it combines the three F’s of food, fashion, and fiction. Ali points out that there are many pages that are segment-specific but none that cater specifically to these three. As a non-monetised community, their content is free for the consumption of users. The Blend For Food app is launching a freemium concept to attract users but later it plans to move to a Content to Commerce model, with a subscription fee where users have access to the best content around food. This is the plan for 2023.
“We are a brand born on social media. Most of our visibility comes from social media activities including paid ads that we run to make sure our content reaches new users every day. We also have a website, which builds credibility around the vision of the brand. Our vision was to get communities together in a physical format, and therefore we launched Blend Bazaar. This was a day-long event of fun, food, fashion, films, and music, where we hosted meet and greet sessions for homegrown brands, creators, and users. Blend Bazaar was tremendously successful in its first edition and we plan to have multiple seasons of it,” smiles Ali.
As a community that puts creators first, Blend Community is set to grow from strength to strength. They are now increasing their marketing focus to go beyond social media promotions and include SEO for Google and other such initiatives. Ali hopes that these measures will enable them to take the community page to a larger number of users and double the community size by the end of this year. She also anticipates that Blend For Food will have at least 50k app downloads and 35k active users in Bengaluru by the end of 2022.
Communities of this nature are far more than just pages for social media promotions—they work to get creators, brands, and users on an even footing. They keep community members engaged and assess the pain points and missing aspects in each of the specified industries. There is no doubt that in an oversaturated space, a curated platform is the need of the hour. It provides users with the best choices backed by the creator and influencer economy and helps creators grow as well.
Noor Anand Chawla pens lifestyle articles for various publications and her blog www.nooranandchawla.com. She can be reached on nooranand@gmail.com.