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 weddingwear 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 womens and mens 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 Universitys casual sports wear; Mangos
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 inhouse 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 25to-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 ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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.