With a current revenue run rate of $1 billion (revenues which the company expects by next year), Myntra has proved that a mobile-only strategy works best in the Indian e-commerce industry. Remember, it’s a marketplace, and real revenues could be measured as net of commissions plus revenues from own brands.
Technology-wise, the smartphone is here to conquer. No wonder Myntra’s parent company, Flipkart, has been spending big bucks on asking TV viewers to download the app.
The question is whether Flipkart will go all-app by mid-2016? Sources in the company say that this may not happen, because at least 30 per cent of the revenues still come from other form-factors such as desktops and laptops.
But Myntra is upping the ante in technology. Its data systems and user interface are going to customise fashion according to shoppers’ preferences. Soon, shoppers will have a home pages customised to their shopping habits, where they can upload their fashion pictures to their Myntra profile page. This data will enable Myntra to tailor its inventory to customers’ demands.
This is similar to how brick-and-mortar retailers such as Shoppers Stop and Lifestyle were successful. Of course, their system used points accrued by loyal shoppers to understand the kind of apparel and accessories that they bought in the stores. Loyalty programmes helped the retailers manage inventory and cater to their loyal shoppers.
However size and fit, especially in western wear, remain issues, and this is exactly what Myntra wants to fix with its technology solutions. The e-Tailer is using distributed computing engines to slice data by variables ranging from price, fit, colour, size, supplier output, and social data. There could be over 500 data points which the company is experimenting with to create social fashion on the mobile.
“Fashion is such a large industry that our data shows that most of the youngsters are on the mobile and want fashion to be accessed on the go,” says Mukesh Bansal, founder of Myntra and head of Flipkart’s commerce platform.
Startups such as CandidlyCouture and Kaaryah are already working on creating customised fits for Indian women, with an intelligent supply chain and customised order manufacturing. Myntra plans to continue investing in seven or eight of its own brands to build a customised portfolio.
The size of the fashion industry is $60 billion at present, and will grow to $200 billion by 2025, according to a report by Wazir Advisors. “The fashion industry has been the most organised retail industry, and it is only going to increase with mobile penetration,” says Harminder Sahni, founder of Wazir Advisors.
Myntra has clearly beaten every other Internet fashion company. All it has to do now is to focus on building a large apparel retail business, for which it has already charted out a plan. It may hive off some of its brands to be sold in brick-and-mortar formats, or even create standalone stores. That, however, is still just an idea.
(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 28-12-2015)
