Flipkart-owned Myntra expects to see a 60 per cent growth in sales this festive season as compared to last year. The company is estimating a massive uptick in demand, at 4-times over BAU (business as usual) and about 1.6-times over the last festive season, with about 40 per cent contribution coming from tier 2-3 markets. Myntra is expecting about 5.5 million unique customers to shop during its upcoming Big Fashion Festival, and 1.1 million are expected to be unique first-time customers during the period. BusinessLine spoke to Amar Nagaram, CEO of Myntra about the company’s preparations for the expected surge in this Big Fashion Festival.
How is Myntra preparing to serve the demands of the millions of first-time shoppers who are expected to shop this season?
We have increased the number of brands on the platform by 40 per cent (7,000 brands) over the previous edition. We are also very particular about the kind of brands that we onboard and for making that decision we look at the consumer demand coming from different regions. In fact, one of the biggest transitions we have made, as a fashion platform, is following the data. This has helped us realise that the South shops differently from the North, and East shops differently from the West. There are differences in terms of the kind of fabric, colour, pattern and style etc, consumers from various regions like. So, we have taken all these insights back to the brands and asked them if they can solve for a particular cohort of users, specific price range, and the kind of styles that people are looking at. Everything is data-driven for us. India is as diverse as it can get and as we go deeper in the country, we realise that we cannot afford to have one similar set of portfolios for the entire country which is why we diversified a lot. We now have brands that are valued in the South, brands that are valued in the North and so on. Overall, that’s how we are putting all these brands together.
How much growth in sales do you expect to see this year, as compared to last season?
We focus on the input metrics and the output metrics will speak for themselves. If I have to give you an estimate, it (festive season sales) will be almost 60 per cent over the last season in terms of expected demand, given how we are planning our input metrics.
Pandemic is said to have increased the number of e-commerce users in tier 2 and beyond cities. How did this reflect in Myntra’s user base?
Contribution from tier 2 and tier 3 cities went up in 2020 because a lot of migration has also happened from the metro to these cities. Now, with vaccination numbers going up, people are actually coming back to the metro and tier 1. Hence, the share of Metro and Tier 1 will be higher than what it was last year. But if we just look at Tier 2, Tier 3 segments we are going almost 50 per cent y-o-y in tier 2 and tier 3 markets. This trend has also contributed to the kinds of styles, local campaigns, the kind of localisation that we are doing in our communications as well.
How is Myntra preparing for the upcoming festive season in terms of logistics?
We recently announced hiring about 11,000 ground staff for our last-mile deliveries and contact centre for customer support, strengthening our SCM capabilities further. Further, we have also strengthened our supply chain network across the country, with the addition of 1 fulfillment center (FC), 3 mother hubs, 12 satellite hubs, and 171 distribution centres to significantly enhance capacity for higher storage volumes and optimise last-mile deliveries further.
We have also ramped up our omni network by over 2.5-times of the last festive season and integrated over 2,600 stores from 300 brands (from 100 brands in BFF’20) to ensure faster deliveries. We have scaled our kirana network by 30 per cent taking store count to 25,000 stores. Over 70 per cent of the festive deliveries across the country will be undertaken by our kirana network partners.