The best way to learn is usually by example. With that said, this Indian clothing dropshipping store has plenty to teach. I’ve spent many hours compiling every bit of information about this brand and its success. You’re going to dive into this guide and hopefully apply this knowledge to avoid crucial mistakes and speed up the growth of your dropshipping store.
In this analysis of Urban Monkey, we’re going to do a very in-depth dive into the following:
- Brand Overview
- Business Model and Niche
- Website Analysis
- Urban Monkey’s Audience
- Marketing Strategies
- Customer Experience
- Technology and Tools
How can all of this help you directly? Well, nothing is preventing you from learning from their mistakes and successes. Also, who says you can’t copy some of their marketing strategies and add your own spices to make them unique and, hopefully, better?
As I said before, one of the best ways to learn is by example.
1. Brand Overview
Urban Monkey is an Indian streetwear brand founded by Yash Gangwal in 2013. The brand emerged from Yash’s passion for skateboarding and his desire to fill the gap in authentic street culture representation in India.
Growing up in Hong Kong and returning to India after his graduation in Australia, Yash was inspired by the vibrant street cultures abroad and recognized a lack of similar representation in India. This led to the creation of Urban Monkey.
Urban Monkey has since expanded its offerings to include a wide range of streetwear products such as caps, beanies, wallets, sunglasses, and more. The brand is known for its bold designs that resonate with the underground street culture and the hip-hop scene in India.
The core philosophy of Urban Monkey revolves around encouraging self-expression and individuality, providing tools for everyday artists to overcome their challenges, and fostering a strong community of like-minded individuals.
- Founding Year: 2013
- Founder(s): Yash Gangwal
2. Business Model and Niche
Urban Monkey uses various third-party manufacturers and suppliers to deliver their unique clothing and accessories.
“We have collaborated with third-party manufacturing units in India, China, and Bangladesh to manufacture our products. In India, we have a third-party manufacturing facility in Tirupur.” – YG
Initially, the founder was planning to sell skateboards with unique designs. However, as you can see, the store has expanded greatly since 2014. Today, their catalog includes:
- Hats and caps
- Skateboards
- Bottoms
- Eyewear
- Accessories
These are just the main categories of products. Inside, you’ll find dozens of subcategories to choose from.
- Niche: Indian streetwear
- Business Model: B2C, directly selling from their Shopify website
3. Website Analysis
This is where things start getting interesting. What you’re about to see are critical stats and details about the Urban Monkey website, including their monthly site traffic, visitor demographics, traffic sources, and more.
This information comes from several sources, the most notable of which are Semrush and SimilarWeb.
Site Traffic
Urban Monkey has been experiencing a steady increase in traffic since 2022. Data about the website’s traffic is available from 2017, featuring a couple of thousand monthly visits during that period. Rapid growth occurred from 2020 until 2023, growing from around 17k to 600k monthly visits.
As you can see, drastic changes can happen in only two or three years. Currently, the website’s traffic stands at around 520k monthly visits. This is mainly organic traffic with only 1% of its total traffic coming from paid ads.
Keep in mind that not all of these 500k visits are unique people. This is just the total number of clicks on the website. The number of unique visitors that the website has gotten in the past month is around 297k.
Traffic Sources
There are seven main sources where Urban Monkey’s traffic is coming from. This includes Direct traffic, Email, Organic, Referrals, Social Media, Paid Search, and Display Ads.
These are going to be the main sources of traffic for your store and for most dropshipping stores in the world. So, you must learn about them and find out where your customers are likely to come from as early as possible.
Why? Because that’s where you’ll want to pour most of your time and resources into.
- Direct: Traffic that comes directly to the website without any intermediary source, usually by typing the URL into the browser.
- Email: Traffic that arrives from email campaigns, including newsletters and other email marketing efforts.
- Referrals: Traffic that comes from links on other websites, directing users to the target site.
- Social: Traffic originating from social media platforms, including posts and shared links.
- Organic Search: Traffic that comes from unpaid search results on search engines like Google and Bing.
- Paid Search: Traffic generated from paid advertisements on search engines, typically through PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.
- Display Ads: Traffic driven by display advertising campaigns, including banners and other graphical ads displayed on various websites.
User Experience
You might not think that this is a priority at first, but the user experience is crucial for any online store. The easier it is for a customer to navigate through your store and buy an item, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Let’s see how Urban Monkey’s Shopify store performs.
Most of the time, the majority of any dropshipping store’s traffic will come from mobile. In this case, around 85% of all visitors visit the store on mobile, and the rest are from desktop computers.
What does this mean for you? It means that you must ensure your mobile version is exceptionally optimized. Actually, both versions have to be optimized but if you were to focus on one, make sure everything is as smooth as possible on mobile.
Here are some statistics of how the average user experience looks when someone lands on Urban Monkey’s online store.
- Average Visit Duration: The average duration of a website visitor on this store is 1:49s.
- Pages per Visit: When a user comes here, they usually visit around 4.55 pages. This means that one user might visit 6 pages, another might visit 4. This is the usual case.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who immediately leave the store after landing is 36.19%, which is actually very good in this industry. The lower this is, the better!
4. Urban Monkey’s Audience
Now that you know how many visits and unique visitors Urban Monkey gets, it’s time to actually see what types of people these visitors are. In this section, we’re going to look at the store’s audience in-depth.
If you have a similar dropshipping brand or are planning to start one, this section is very important for you. Chances are your audience will be very similar.
Below, you can see more detailed information about the store’s audience. But, here is the most important info you need to know when building your audience for a similar brand.
- Visitor Location: 87% India
- Gender: 63% Men – 37% Women
- Age: 69% between 18 and 34. 21% between 35 and 54.
- Interests: Lifestyle, Fashion & Apparel, Online Shopping, Clothing, Sports.
Visitor Location
The majority of their traffic comes from India. In fact, this is the main traffic location that matters to them. The rest are merely less than 13% of the site’s total traffic combined.
Gender and Age
A lot more of Urban Monkey’s visitors are men. This doesn’t mean that there will always be more men interested in this niche. In this case, more men seem to be attracted to the brand and its offerings. 63.23% of the site’s visitors are men, while 36.77% are women.
Regarding age, the majority of their visitors are aged between 18 and 34, covering around 69% of total traffic. Another 14% goes to users who are between the ages of 35 and 44. The last notable percentage is 9%, for visitors aged between 45 and 54. The rest are older than 55 but this is a fairly small percentage.
Interests
Audience interests are important when it comes to launching ads. The more you know about what your audience wants, the better you can create your ads for them. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know what their interests are before you get an actual audience.
Luckily, similar brands to Urban Monkey can learn from their data and use it to make better decisions. Here’s how it looks.
You shouldn’t always take this information too seriously. However, you can use the industry distribution percentage and the topic distribution to understand what are some common interests of these people. With it, you can improve your research and go in the right direction.
5. Marketing Strategies
It’s true that sales is the most important thing if you want to be profitable with dropshipping. However, you need to get your marketing right if you want to have a consistent flow of sales. Urban Monkey utilizes various marketing strategies to grow their audience, build their brand, and drive sales consistently.
Let’s look at what they’re doing.
SEO Strategy
Their biggest traffic channel is their organic reach. This means that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how they make most of their sales.
Urban Monkey is currently ranking for thousands of keywords. A keyword is something users search online for, such as “hoodie”, “cap”, and many more. Let’s see how many of these Urban Monkey is successfully ranking for.
- India: 16.8k keywords
- US: 10.8k keywords
- UK: 1.6k keywords
- Canada: 1.6k keywords
- Australia: 1.1k keywords
The rest of the keywords in other countries they rank in are much lower than these ones.
Urban Monkey’s SEO and content marketing strategy is fairly simple. However, this sort of strategy requires a lot of time, hard work, and patience.
A lot of their SEO clicks come from the product pages themselves. Their product pages for caps, wallets, and many other items rank naturally on Google in the countries we mentioned above.
However, there’s a bit more to it. The second part of their content marketing is their blog. They write and publish guides on topics that readers are searching for actively on Google and Bing. For example, they write guides on streetwear clothing, lists of amazing clothing items, and many more.
Finally, backlinks are a huge part of the store’s online search rankings. Backlinks are basically other websites and pages that link to the store. For example, here is an article that links to the Urban Monkey store. It’s basically an article showcasing the top 5 most comfortable hoodies. The Urban Monkey website has close to 60k of these backlinks from other sites.
In order to understand how important this is, imagine all of these 60k links get at least one click per day. That’s 60k extra clicks each and every day to the Urban Monkey store. Now, these click numbers aren’t always so positive but you get the idea.
Social Media Presence
Social media is, and always will be, an amazing source of traffic for any kind of business. Plus, sometimes, if you’re lucky enough, you can go viral and change your life overnight. Urban Monkey also relies on social media to attract around 62k visitors each month, according to SimilarWeb.
Before we see how much traffic each of their social media accounts attracts, first let’s have a look at how many followers they have.
- Instagram (674k followers): Here, they mainly post product photos and reels of their products. The average engagement is a couple of thousand likes per post.
- Facebook (29k followers): They use Facebook to post product content as well as upcoming events, news, and deals.
- X/Twitter (345 followers): The brand hasn’t posted anything on X since 2020.
- Pinterest (67 followers): Urban Monkey’s Pinterest is pretty bad. It’s clear that they don’t spend too many resources or effort on this platform.
- YouTube (27.6k subscribers): The brand’s YouTube channel isn’t anything special. They post videos every couple of months and it’s just basic content about the store.
- TikTok (19 followers): TikTok is another platform that the brand doesn’t find any interest in. They have a couple of videos which are very poor quality.
From all of this, we can see that a fashion dropshipping store like Urban Monkey mainly focuses on Instagram and Facebook to convert followers and viewers into customers. This is one reason why you should try your luck on all of these platforms to grow your brand. As you can see, one platform produced 19 followers while another one got them hundreds of thousands of followers.
Advertising
As we realized earlier, Urban Monkey doesn’t spend too many resources on paid advertising. According to SimilarWeb, around 1% of their total traffic comes from paid ads. They can afford this due to their incredibly strong organic performance. If you were just starting out, paid ads would be a quicker source of traffic for you until you build a similar organic audience.
But still, the store is running ads as we speak and testing out new strategies to grow. This is always an important part of the job.
Right now, Urban Monkey has active ads on Facebook. They are mainly advertising their caps, which is one of their best-selling products for a long time.
Partnerships
In addition to everything else, Urban Monkey is also partnered with other brands and influencers to grow their communities together. Some of their most notable partnerships include:
6. Customer Experience
The next thing I was very curious about when it comes to this brand is what actual customers are saying about the products and the customer service. So, the first thing I did was jump on the popular review sites like TrustPilot and Judge.me and went through some reviews.
Here’s what I found.
Customer Reviews: The customer reviews about this brand and its service are very positive. There aren’t many reviews on TrustPilot but there were thousands of reviews on Judge.me.
- TrustPilot: 2 Reviews (3.4 Rating)
- Judge Me: 12.928 Reviews (4.8 Rating)
Customer Service: The brand’s customer support and service is worth praising. Visitors can reach their support on their email: hello@urbanmonkey.com.
Return and Refund Policies: If you want to make a return and get a refund, you can follow a simple process on their return’s page.
7. Technology and Tools
The Urban Monkey online store is built on Shopify. It has seen a bit more custom work than just simply loading up a free or paid theme. However, this doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Usually, Shopify’s themes are designed well-enough to see great results.
Here’s a list of all of the apps and technology that the online store is using:
| App Name | Category | Free or Paid |
| DoubleClick Advertiser | Advertising | Paid |
| Facebook Advertiser | Advertising | Paid |
| DoubleClick | Advertising | Free |
| Facebook Custom Audiences | Advertising | Free |
| HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) | Audio Video Media | Free |
| Akamai | Content Delivery Network | Paid |
| Amazon S3 | Content Delivery Network | Paid |
| CloudFlare | Content Delivery Network | Free |
| VWO | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Akamai mPulse | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Google Analytics | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Lucky Orange | Conversion & Analytics | Paid |
| Clarity | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Hotjar | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Smile io | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Judge Me | Conversion & Analytics | Free |
| Content Security Policy | Document Standard | Free |
| FAQ Page | Document Standard | Free |
| Theme Color Tag | Document Standard | Free |
| back in stock | ECommerce | Free |
| Shopify | ECommerce | Paid |
| G Suite | Email Services | Paid |
| Amazon SES | Email Services | Free |
| WebEngage | Feedback and Surveys | Paid |
| Amazon | Information Technology | Free |
| Information Technology | Free | |
| Information Technology | Free | |
| jQuery | JavaScript | Free |
| Masonry | JavaScript | Free |
| Google Tag Manager | JavaScript | Free |
| English HREF LANG | Language | Free |
| Google Marketing Platform | Marketing | Paid |
| Apple Mobile Tags | Mobile | Free |
| Meta Viewport | Mobile | Free |
| Google API | Other | Free |
| Cart Functionality | Payment & Currencies | Free |
| Venmo | Payment & Currencies | Free |
| PayPal | Payment & Currencies | Paid |
| Paytm | Payment & Currencies | Paid |
| Cookie Consent | Privacy | Free |
| GoDaddy Nameserver | Server | Paid |
| Microsoft | Server | Free |
| GoDaddy Hosting | Server | Paid |
| nginx | Server | Free |
| Physical Store | Site Features | Paid |
| Facebook Connect | Social | Free |
| Social | Free | |
| Instagram Links | Social | Free |
| Facebook Pixel | Tracker | Free |
| General Captcha | Widget | Free |
| Google Maps | Widget | Free |
Conclusion
I honestly believe that there’s plenty to take away from this big dropshipping brand. If you’re planning to start a similar dropshipping business, or you already have one, use this analysis to make better decisions. As you can see, these big brands aren’t much different than a new brand that’s just starting out. The main factor is time and pushing through the challenges.
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