At a time when the fashion industry at large is going through a lull, ecommerce marketplace, Myntra, is confident that the upcoming festival season will rake in double the sales from last year. "We are expecting 4.2 million customers of which 1 million will be new customers," says Amar Nagaram, CEO, Myntra. Just as it is in most other sectors, Myntra is also expecting over 50 per cent sales to come from the tier 2-3 markets. Small town India has shown greater resilience through the pandemic and the fashion web site has seen a stronger growth from tier 2-3 markets. "The metro and tier 1 consumers moved away from fashion, but the premium consumers of tier 2-3 who typically travelled to the nearest metro city or even went abroad, are now coming to Myntra to shop," Nagaram further explains.
Myntra, claims Nagaram, has been helping its brands partners to bounce back by sharing with them consumer insights. "What told them what consumers were searching for. We worked with brands such as Wildcraft to come up with masks. We also told brands to focus more on loungewear as opposed to formal collections. We told sports brands to increase their focus on active wear instead of performance wear. This has led most brands to on-demand manufacturing of fashion."
However, the trends during Ganesh Chaturthi and Rakshabandhan has given the marketplace confidence to go aggressive with its occasion wear strategy. In its upcoming Big Fashion Festival, the fashion major is going to offer nine lakh styles from over 5,000 brands. "In addition to the various national and international brands, we are also working with the handloom emporiums of various State Governments to offer their collection on our platform. You will also see local ethnic wear brands such as Pothy's from Chennai on the platform," says Nagaram. The fashion portal is also organising flash sales where consumers can buy brands at all-time low prices for a few hours in a day. "We are also doing innovative things like 'crazy deals', 'price crash' and so on, which offline retail has never done," Nagaram further explains.
The Big Fashion Festival will reach out to 27,000 pin codes, for which the market place has added 6,000 kirana stores to its network of 18,000 kirana partners which would be doing last mile deliveries. The ecommerce major has also stepped up its omni-channel partnership with its brand partners. The physical stores of its brand partners (such as Bata, Pepe, Pantaloons etc) would also be used for deliveries. Myntra has already integrated 1,000 such stores across 100 brands in its network and the plan is to add another 3,000 stores in the next 5-6 months.
Nagaram says that Myntra saw sales bouncing back in June-July when the Government allowed 'unlocking' of the country, and in the last couple of months it has surpassed the pre-Covid numbers.