Myntra to marry fashion, tradition in Wedding Store

(Source: The Hindu)

BANGALORE, OCTOBER 30:  Fashion and lifestyle online retailer Myntra.com, which was acquired by Flipkart earlier this year, is all set to launch ‘The Wedding Store’ in early November.

“We have gone beyond selling products on our website, we will now offer wedding-wear solutions under one roof,” Ganesh Subramanian, COO, Myntra.com told Business Line.

The Wedding Store will offer wedding wear and accessories (shoes, bags, jewellery, bindis, and so on) that a bride and groom will require. It will also have everything that visitors and guests attending the wedding will need.

New brands“The store includes ethnic women’s and men’s wear and regional specialities such as dhoti-kurta andlehenga-choli that are worn in many parts of the country. The endeavour is to provide wedding-wear and accessories to people from different parts of the country,” he said.

Myntra has launched one premium international fashion brand every fortnight from August to October, in keeping with its strategy to target the fashion aspirations of the youth. The brands include Harvard University’s casual sports wear; Mango’s international collection for women; international menswear brand Antony Morato, Tommy Hilfiger, Gas, and others such as Girls on Film, Paper Dolls and Little Mistress.

Fresh styles“A thousand styles go live on Myntra everyday. Of these, one-third are from our in-house brands and the rest from our premium, international fashion brands. The idea is to infuse freshness on our website everyday,” said Subramanian.

Myntra is also investing in personalising the shopping experience to cater to the requirements of individual customers.

“For instance, if a customer wants to buy tees or shoes from Myntra, based on his or her past buying behaviour, our site will throw up options that the customer has shown a preference for earlier,” Subramanian said.

He added: “Sales on Myntra during this Diwali season has grown by 300 per cent over the same season last year. As a group (Flipkart and

Myntra) will, by December, be as big as the largest fashion store chain which has a footprint of 70 stores across the country,” said Subramanian.

Future, Tesco Data company in JV to develop customer insights

(Source: ET Retail.com)

MUMBAI: The Future Group has formed a joint venture with Dunnhumby, a data analysis company owned by British retailer Tesco, to develop and sell customer insights to clients in India. UK-based Dunnhumby helps global retailers and brands such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Kroger analyse data to improve customer experiences and build loyalty.

Dunnhumby will use consumer data generated from the Future Group's retail network that attracts nearly 300 million customers at stores in more than 100 cities.

Dunnhumby said it will bring on board its tools and knowledge to leverage the data to try uncover insights on what customers want, where they want it, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

"The ability to understand complete spending patterns provides us with great opportunity to grow the lifetime value of our customers, by being more relevant and providing value to them," Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani said. Dunnhumby has similar ventures with retailers such as Kroger Co in the US, Metro in Canada and Gruppo PAM in Italy.With over 25 mn members, the Future Group's loyalty networks can provide consumer data that tracks brand, category, price preferences and demographic data of its customers.

Malls Lay Out a New Experience(Source: The Times Of India)

New Delhi: As more shoppers head online, malls are adding more

restaurants, spas, salons & even medical clinics to woo customers.

Shopping malls in the country are going through a transformation to

make themselves more of an `experiential' destination, adding more

restaurants, spas, salons and even doctor clinics, at least partially

influenced by the recent boom in online shopping.

Bangalore-based real estate developer Prestige Group, for example, plans

to bring food offerings to almost every floor and prominently on the first

floor of its upcoming shopping malls rather than restricting food outlets

mostly to the top floor as is the common practice now.

“Earlier people used to come for shopping and they would eat. Now, we

think they will come for food and will shop as well,“ said Suresh

Singaravelu, executive director for retail at Prestige. “This is partly in

response to increasing the experiential content and partly in response in

recognition of the fact that you need to increase frequency of mall visits

with all the online retailer catching the consumers' imaginations.“

With online retailers such as Flipkart and Amazon seen cornering a

chunk of the expected growth in India's overall modern retailing,

industry insiders say a lot of mall owners are nervous.

“We are all worried. We are trying to find out how we can fight the online

and the issue of customers moving out,“ said a Mumbai mall developer

who keeps in regular touch with other mall owners in the city through an

e-mail group.“We are trying to find solutions.“Looking at the prospects of

the flight of a chunk of middle class consumers to online channels, malls

are coming up with new offerings to attract consumers.

Infiniti Mall in Mumbai plans an e-commerce site where its tenants can

sell online, but consumers must visit the mall to take the delivery . Across

town, Palladium Mall has doubled the number of events such as musical

evenings to fashion shows this year.

Web-only brands use marketplace to

gain visibility & woo customers to own

sites with unique offers(Source: The Economic Times)

BENGALURU: Large retailers struggling to ensure that online sellers don't cannibalise their traditional sales channels could learn a thing or two from young web-only brands, which offer products on their own websites and in marketplaces.

Depending on how you look at it, it's either a tightrope act or the best of both worlds. Online retailers of clothing and accessories such as American Swan, FabAlley, Vox Pop Clothing, Zovi and Yepme sell products on websites including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, Myntra and Jabong. These young fashion brands also have separate clothing lines and made-to-order products to drive traffic to their own sites.

"When you are new, you need visibility, which only aggregators can provide," said Anurag Rajpal, founder and chief executive officer of the American Swan Lifestyle Company, set up two years ago. "But the aggregators are chasing toplines aggressively and the heavy discounts ensure that our products are cheaper on their sites than on ours." Aggregators account for half of the sales of the American Swan brand of apparel and accessories and the company expects to double sales to Rs 80 crore in this financial year.

"We get to reach over a million people a day only because of being on marketplaces," said Shivani Poddar, co-founder of two-year-old FabAlley, which sells on Flipkart, Myntra and Jabong, apart from its own portal. "But customers have told us they buy our products on other sites due to higher discounts."

Marketplaces are good to gain reach, according to Rohan Dighe, founder of ViralMint, a technology provider that helps sites such as Lenskart, IndianRoots and FabAlley to maximise onsite revenue. "But as a brand owner, the brand will want to own the channel of distribution and highlight the brand, which will happen only on its own site," said Dighe.

Brands have to differentiate on product ranges and assortment to protect their core channel, Technopak's Singh said. "The rules of the game are getting established and brands - large or small - need to get used to the new reality of online marketplaces," she said.

Gurgaon-based American Swan is doing just that. It is set to launch a range of clothing for 18-to-24-year-olds that will be sold only on its portal for about 900. The company's core product range of western apparel and accessories is focused on 25-to-35-year-olds and is sold at an average price of Rs 1,500.

New Delhi-based FabAlley, with a gross revenue of about 1.8 crore a month, introduces about 400 new products every month on its site. Only one-fourth of them make it to other portals. Its new products are available on marketplaces 2-3 weeks after they are launched on FabAlley.

At $2.3 billion, e-tailing accounts for 0.4% of overall retail in India and is projected to grow rapidly to about 3% of the total domestic market, with a size of $32 billion by 2020, according to Technopak Advisors, a consultancy firm. There is growing demand for online channels that have a wider reach and deliver even in smaller cities and towns, Technopak said in a paper on its website. "It is still early days of e-commerce and that is why we are seeing this tussle between brands and online platforms," said Pragya Singh, an associate vice president at retail advisory firm Technopak.

The predicament is tougher for companies that get a significant portion of their sales from online marketplaces. For instance, over 70% of FabAlley's sales come from other portals.

Slightly older online-only brands such as Yepme and Zovi get less than 20% of their sales from third-party sites. Both companies only sell a portion of their range on marketplaces and launch products first on their own site before releasing to other portals. "If you want the full range, you have to come to our site," said Vevek Gaur, who co-founded Gurgaon-based Yepme in 2011.

Some brands offer unique services to attract buyers to their sites. Year-and-a-half old merchandising brand Vox Pop Clothing allows brands and even individuals to upload designs and customise T-shirts that are produced and sold on its platform. The company, which is targeting sales of Rs 1 crore a month by December, is set to start retailing some of its

products on marketplaces such as Flipkart and Amazon.

American Swan and FabAlley are among those that also conduct flash sales on their sites and have set aside certain days of the month to offer discounts. "We need to continue to do business with the giants and sharks," said Rajpal of American Swan. "But we need to maintain a balance so that our brand is protected and there is no cannibalisation of sales from our own site."

Hindustan Unilever Ltd jumps on e-

commerce bandwagon

(Source : India.com)

M&S reports 35% growth in

India in six months(Source : ET Retail.com)

BigBasket opens central warehouse in Hyderabad(Source : Business Standard)

Fabindia to open nine new stores by March

(Source : Business Standard)

India will be among our largest markets globally: Burger King

(Source : Business Standard)

Cbazaar gets Rs 50-crore

private equity fund line(Source : ET Retail.com)

BENGALURU: Cbazaar, an online Indian ethnic wear store, has received funding of Rs30-Rs50 crore from private equity firm Forum Synergies and other investors as it prepares to scale up operations.

Wine resorts, a concept here to �stay�(Source : The Financial Express)

Wine resorts are pretty common concepts in wine-growing regions of the world, especially France, Australia and South Africa. In India, the concept of wine-tasting rooms has just about begun to pick up and wineries are beginning to think about offering accommodation as well to their guests. Grover Zampa, the second largest wine manufacturer in the country, has decided to take this route and enter the hospitality sector.

The winery is planning to set up a 70-100-room premium hotel on its winery at Nashik. "We are in advanced stage of talks with a couple of international players who have shown a keen interest in operating the hotel," Sumedh Singh Mandla, CEO, Grover Zampa Vineyards told FE. This is the first time any winemaker in the country will set up a large hotel. Wine resorts are pretty common in other wine growing countries, especially Europe and Australia where travellers visit the resorts for their yineyard views in addition to the wine tastings, he said. Although such resorts are usually run on a smaller scale, Grover Zampa has decided to set up a larger hotel in this location in anticipation of interested tourists from both Mumbai and Pune. The promoters of Grover Zampa hold about 50% stake in the company, while Reliance Capital and the others own the rest. It has a total of 400 acres of vineyard in Nashik and Bangalore.

"We are in the process of obtaining the necessary clearances from authorities and these are expected any time during this fiscal," he said without disclosing the investment involved in the project. Grover Zampa Vineyards recently launched the Vijay Amritraj Reserve Collection of white and red wines. The product was launched during the recently concluded Wimbledon tournament and received rave reviews from wine critics, he said.