Amazon recently opened a physical bricks-and-mortar clothing store in Los Angeles (USA) aiming at giving consumers a whole new retail experience and the e-commerce biggie made headlines for all the right reasons.
What was the buzz about this new store? A store that’s described as a mix of data-driven technologies such as Amazon Style app-based interactions, in-store styling-and-fitting services, online-to-IRL try-ons, and Amazon One palm-recognition-based checkouts seems futuristic but the bold step taken by Amazon echoes its long-term planning that involves technology and customers.
Amazon is just one example of how Western fashion retailers and e-tailers are integrating technology to transform themselves so that consumers get a whole new shopping experience. This is something that has been lacking in the Indian apparel retail landscape for a long time; however, the Indian fashion retail has been evolving at a right time as the consumers’ disposable income is finally growing after short-lived Covid woes, and their exposure to global markets and brands is increasing. The consumers of today are time-pressed but have easy access to technology and they anticipate their shopping experience not to be a traditional one!
These factors are driving the organised fashion retail of India – that’s fast approaching to US $ 100 billion – to start using technologies both in offline stores and online channels that assist retailers, brands and e-tailers to streamline their processes and improve visibility into their operations along with the obvious benefits their consumers get in terms of engagement and experience. Apart from adopting core technologies, brands in India are also quick to venture into metaverse giving NFT fashion fever the much-needed push in the country.
One of the most commendable tech-integrations done in recent times is by leading Indian fashion e-commerce brand AJIO – owned by Reliance Retail – as it has launched a technology-based Quality Check Return Product (QC-RVP) in the beginning of 2022. Powered by Delhivery, the QC-RVP enables 26,000 last mile agents of Delhivery to perform stringent quality checks at the customer’s doorstep from a checklist of over 20 parameters before returning the shipment to AJIO.
With this technology, AJIO has successfully increased the resale ability of returned goods to 98 per cent in 2022 from mere 25 per cent, boosting margins and reducing waste. Additionally, AJIO has been able to shorten the process of refund remittance to 24 hours, while this QC-RVP solution has resulted in a 130 per cent jump in AJIO’s NPS (Net Promoter Score).
“With joint innovation in technology and operational processes, we have leveraged overall goodness to drive consumer experience. This has enabled better retention metrics for the platform”, commented Ashutosh Srivastava, COO, AJIO.
The fashion e-commerce giant Myntra has been exemplary in technology adoption ever since it forayed into offline retailing with a store called ‘Roadster Go’. The store, sprawling over 3,200 square feet, claims to be providing a fresh omnichannel experience to Myntra’s consumers. It is a 100 per cent RFID-enabled (Radio-frequency identification) store, allowing shoppers to do a smarter and seamless self-checkout in 30 seconds. RFID-enabled digital screens at the store give detailed information about products when held up against it. This includes type of fabric, suitable washing options, suitability to body type, colour matching and size availability on studio images in the store. The fashion e-tailer has also eliminated the need for scanning individual products and removing security tags from each garment.
Not just offline store, Myntra is integrating technology to its core business that is e-commerce. Myntra has strengthened its cloud services capabilities by leveraging Microsoft’s public cloud Azure which allows it to strengthen operational efficiency for onboarding millions of new customers and lakhs of sellers to the e-commerce platform.
After deploying Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads, Myntra is embarking on cloud innovation projects that will further leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform solutions. It registered over 7,000 orders per minute and 700,000 peak-level concurrent users during one of its end-of-season sale events last year!
Decathlon – a renowned sports goods brand – was one of the first brands in India to start ‘Buy Online, Pay In Store’ (BOPIS) concept and it’s still running seamlessly. With over 100 stores across India and having a powerful online presence, Decathlon India offers a gratifying shopping experience to all sports enthusiasts. The brand enables its customers to book a product online and collect the same from a store chosen by them in their preferred location. BOPIS implementation helps Decathlon drive extra foot traffic to the store from its e-commerce channel as customers’ visit to the store puts them in an immediate position to buy additional merchandise, or make an impulse purchase.
Apart from BOPIS, Decathlon has also built an Al-based personalisation and recommendation engine. Because of the wide range of products, assortments are huge and it gets difficult for Decathlon to navigate the website and discover the right products for customers. The Al-based engine looks at the customer’s interest, sport preference, past browsing history and past purchases from Decathlon and then it recommends products and services which customers are most likely to use and purchase. This has directly increased the customer experience because they don’t need to search or look for the products on Decathlon website.
As much as the established brands like Decathlon, Myntra and AJIO are transforming Indian fashion retail, the newly emerged brands aren’t much behind! Founded in 2019, Bengaluru-based Styched – a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand – is using on-demand concept to solve fashion conundrums as it follows NO SEASONALITY.
Soumajit Bhowmik, Co-Founder, Styched explains, “Any fashion brand would have between 50-500 different kinds of styles every season. Because of the way it operates, they have to spend a lot on warehousing, on bulk production, on storing them and then liquidating the inventory. Once it gets liquidated, only then can they get a new season in.”
Styched has a mandate to upload 1,000-2,000 designs on its website every week. So people can refresh and see new designs every week. Styched says that its proprietary production on-demand technology helps ensure zero inventory, zero wastage, zero liquidation and zero warehousing.
The start-up has developed backend intelligence that breaks fabrics into scalable patterns. The company also has machine learning and AI-powered backend that drives efficiency in delivery.
Soumajit claims that no matter how many orders Styched gets in a day, it can manufacture and ship that within 24 to 48 hours and no matter what the design is, it can do one piece of that or a 1000 pieces of one design.
Fashion metaverse collection has also kicked off officially in India
In October 2021, Manish Malhotra – a renowned Indian fashion designer – entered the NFT fashion universe when he joined hands with WazirX NFT Marketplace and FDCI x Lakme Fashion Week and created 5 exclusive fashion NFTs. This foray of Manish into Non Fungible Tokens has now made him the first Indian designer to achieve the feat.
Now Indian premium fashion label Papa Don’t Preach has joined the bandwagon and has become the first fashion label of the country to showcase digital fashion in metaverse during the Metaverse fashion show that was recently organised by the Women’s Economic Forum. The label’s Instagram handle shared an exciting glimpse of NNL2.0 sticking to its signature maximalist aesthetic that emulates an authentic Indian design conscience. The virtual line-up consists of a range of embellished lehengas, tulle dresses and a mix of multi, cut-out designs. The consumers can use all these virtual designs on their digital avatars.
“It was totally a Papa Don’t Preach world with six of our pieces that walked the digital runway,” commented Shubhika, Founder of Papa Don’t Preach, adding, “This is our first step into and towards the metaverse, and the possibilities are endless. We showcased our Indian couture to highlight the beauty and intricacies of Indian craftsmanship and tie it to technology and its ever-changing facets.”