Where Customer is King: Myntra Fashion Brands

The e-tailer industry is here to stay, as the CEO of Myntra and Jabong, Ananth Narayanan keeps talking about in most of his interviews. Even though he recognizes the “touch and feel” USP of physical market places and retailers, he points out the undeniable achievement and conveniences that electronic retail and online shopping destinations and platforms have managed to bring to the customer. After all, to reach 16000 pin codes with your services is not something that retail can achieve. 

The Myntra Fashion Brands (MFB) is leading the way to overall profitability for Myntra. The private brands of Myntra, which account for approximately a quarter of its business, have been among the most popular brands on the portal in the last one year. The CEO of Myntra, Ananth Narayanan, believes that building its own brands is exactly what sets Myntra apart, “MFB is a key pillar of Myntra’s strategy to building differential offering, cementing shopper’s loyalty and increasing profitability’, he says. No wonder Myntra’s Fashion Brands occupy 9 spots on the top 20 brands on the platform. Myntra has been working towards bringing private brands under its umbrella for a while now, and these have now come to deliver about 23% of the total business at Myntra, and is growing rapidly. Myntra recently disclosed that the MFB performance is estimated to be at a double-digit EBITDA profitability in the next 18-24 months. Myntra’s prime focus is to grow the brands by using customer/business insights intelligently. The vision is to build Myntra Fashion Brands into the largest house of fashion in the country in the next five years and be the supplier of private brands to the world, says Manohar Kamath, Chief of Myntra Fashion Brands. 

Ananth Narayanan further tells us about the 4 key pillars that Myntra bases its strong business on- Technology, Range and Quality, Speed and Identifying unique white spaces and needs of millennials and Gen Z.

Myntra has been so successful in making it big in the market as well as in the hearts of its customers due to its “customer is King” approach. In accordance to this, Myntra does everything to make the customers experience smoother and more and more convenient. Constant way to improve and make shopping easier and quick for the customers is being worked up, before everything else. 

In addition to this ideology, Myntra Fashion Brands have always seeks to included more and more technological innovations into its domain like Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), for pricing, demand sensing, planning and digital brand marketing. This makes the whole process more democratic. The MFB "Moda Rapido" and "Here & Now” are the first ones to be completely conceptualized and designed using AI and ML.

MFB offers the largest Range and Quality to its customers by launching 36,000 options per season. The product quality is driven by constant innovation and tech-led consumer insights. This what keeps the consumer coming back.   

Speed is another factor that makes Myntra stand out. MFB works on a shorter and “closer to market designing” calendar keeping them at pace with the right fashion trends.

The world takes note, as Myntra multiples.

Myntra Achieves Revenue Run Rate Worth 1 Billion

Speaking at at Myntra’s 5th Annual Brand Summit – ‘Tech Threads’ - in Bengaluru recently, CEO Anant Narayanan said that Myntra had witnessed 80% year-on-year growth, with an industry-leading revenue run rate of $ 1 billion.

He outlined the main factors behind the rapid growth of Myntra as the company’s acquisition of Jabong as well as the subsequent turnaround of the latter company, in addition to the preceding festival season from Navratri to Diwali.

Elaborating, Narayanan said, “Myntra is at the forefront of fashion in India today, with more than 18 million active users every month. Our unique approach to leverage technology to decode fashion has helped us to become the fastest growing online fashion platform.”

He added that Myntra, Jabong and Flipkart together had 70% of the market share in the country today and would continue to enhance it further by empowering its brands as well as its customers. “We are on track to achieve scalable and sustainable growth and will be EBITA-positive by the financial year 2018,” added Narayanan.

Tech Threads: Narayanan shared that during the phase of growth, Myntra had introduced many new features to enhance the experience of Myntra customers. Myntra had also leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to give customers a highly personalised shopping experience, besides better discovery of products available online in addition to assisted shopping for its customers, he said.

Further, Myntra was also using brand performance analytics to obtain greater insights into customer behaviour, which would, in turn, help the leading fashion portal to develop a loyal fan base and also enable its brand partners to engage better with customers.

Narayanan added that it was the introduction of many new features for enhancing customer experience that had resulted in Myntra being 20 points ahead on NPS than the industry.

The Myntra Summit was attended by delegate representatives from over 300 leading Indian and international fashion and lifestyle brands. The key topic of discussion at the Summit was the ways in which e-commerce was shaping the growth of fashion brands in India. Other topics were: “The Future of Fashion E-Commerce in India”, “Customer Trends”, “The Role of Technology In Delivering Effective Consumer Experiences”, “Technology-Enabled Retail”, “Supply Chain Innovation” and “Building of Brands in the New Age”.

A brand playbook was also unveiled during the Summit, which would enable brands to customise and develop marketing campaigns to leverage Myntra as a digital marketing platform. The Summit concluded with an Awards Night for the brands.

Fashionable Launch: Myntra’s Annual Brand Summit was also the launchpad for two iconic international fashion labels - Hugo Boss and Hackett – on board Myntra’s platform.

Technology, or Tech Threads, the theme of the Brand Summit, is a recurrent theme at Myntra. Earlier, speaking at another forum, the India-Economic Summit, Narayanan described technology as a key enabler at Myntra.

He said, “When you think that e-commerce didn’t exist 5-7 years ago, it’s amazing that a company like Myntra has been able to generate at least 2000 technology-driven jobs and 8000 service-driven jobs. He clarified that all the jobs at Myntra were technology-driven, not just the technology-driven jobs, but the service-driven jobs also. He gave the example of how even a T-shirt or jeans design and style made use of technology.

Therefore, training its employees in how to use technology was crucial to Myntra, said Narayanan. “We even have to think differently about training our employees. We have training programmes every day for using our App, as everyone – from the top guys to the person at the service delivery point – need to know how to use our App. It’s both a framework to develop their skills as well as a way to assess them,” said Narayanan.