With COVID-19 pandemic emerging in the country the economy and many big companies took a hit including fashion industry, Amar Nagaram CEO of Myntra which is India’s leading online fashion retailer was set to face one of the biggest challenges. Nagaram and his team not only needed to consider business continuation and most importantly the role the association could play in a world so significantly changed by the pandemic.
Like most businesses Myntra also had to move their employees to work from home overnight only days before one of their annual deal occasions with the safety of the employees, delivery partners and customers in mind. With the help of Myntra it is now possible to provide brands with consumer insights that take into account not the consumer profile but also the variables such as location, weather patterns and most importantly the consumer’s parameters to purchase anything.
Assessing the situation
Myntra has a strong delivery network of 27,000 pin codes in India the first order of business was to secure essential protective equipment like face masks which were in acute short supply. Myntra in partnership with wildcraft was able to sell essential protective equipment on its platform the others brands too launched their products and a new category for masks was introduced in myntra.
Myntra which overlooks fashion brands like Moda Rapido and Here & Now, now has more data scientists than its designers. Machines tell their designs just what products are sure to sell, with many fashion lines that are being dropped and brands that scale just this tells us that Myntra is up to something big. The intersection of data tech and design by the company has now built a service that going to go global and become revolutionary for the fashion industry.
The Team that made Rapid Technology possible
The team is known to have started out in October 2015, where there only 4 people in rapid team, the process was quite rudimentary. This rapid team came up with a hypothesis that since Myntra already had amounts of data they could use this as an opportunity for better understanding of what the customers want, in order to cater to the demand. The team decided to try this concept out with Kurtas and T- shirts.
The process in the beginning was when someone searched for a query on top selling kurta or T- shirt on myntra and get the corresponding style Ids. Those pictures of those styles would be printed, Scissor cut and manually pasted onto big whiteboards. The pictures were then arranged according to color, T-s shirts and kurtas and so on. The team would then ascertain based on the data, which of these themes were likely to work according to the first batch was designed according to the findings.
These designs then made their way onto the platform under the new brand called Moda Rapido. The result of this process was overwhelming as those products sold phenomenally well. This encouraged the team to implement the same process within the company. “Where there is data there is attribution and intelligence from there the process evolved from spreadsheets, to complex algorithms and now data scientists are looking at all the algorithms,” says Anurag Panganamamula.
The rapid team manifests these insights into two brands owned by myntra’s Moda Rapido and Here & Now which has no seen a steady growth of over 300% every year. In December 2017, Here and now was the second largest apparel brand on Myntra, as it accounts to 2.7% of the platform sales, thanks to its ideal mix of right price, strategy and trend. The time taken for this process is seven to 45 days if it is a whole collection to drop. One of the t-shirt platforms’ turnaround time is 24 hours, and designs drop in even a few hours sometimes.
Reaching out to the customers and providing them with what they want
In the times of Pandemic the introduction of face masks was just the first step with offline stores and malls closed due to active lockdown, major fashion brands had to rethink their marketing strategy and Myntra became a platform to help them. Two years since it all began, Vorta is well on its way to becoming a global Software as a Service (SaaS) product.
With the pandemic however, Myntra has moved its whole information stage including flexibly chain the executives, stock, and site abilities to Microsoft Azure. Aside from giving Myntra the flexibility to take into account request spikes, Azure worked in AI devices facilitated the improvement of cutting edge examination abilities to comprehend their shoppers better.
The measure of information from which we adapt today is six to multiple times more than the pre-COVID world. The amount of data from which they learn today is six to seven times more than the pre-COVID world. Microsoft Azure has enabled them to scale-up overnight and Azure Machine Learning gave us the right kind of levers to expedite our learning.
Microsoft Azure has empowered them to up-scale for the time being, which is why from the early stages of lock-down Myntra had the option to give significant bits of knowledge to help brands with what shoppers were searching for and helped them organize their contributions in like manner. A portion of the quick bits of knowledge from what shoppers were looking, survey, and purchasing, featured how a bigger arrangement of clients was currently remaining at home, adjusting among work and family tasks, and required garments that were useful yet agreeable.
Thus, Myntra was one of the first out of the square to recognize these changing needs and presented Work from Home Alter on its application that focused on classifications like solace wear, loungewear, athleisure, home wear, and ethnic wear.
Making information popular
Nagaram’s vision for the utilization of innovation in design goes a long ways past helping brands explore the current vulnerabilities. The way Myntra has figured out how to help brands in their go to advertise procedure at the beginning of the pandemic is only the start of utilizing information experiences to make the business more customer focused.
Businesses could utilize innovation to upset a portion of the conventional practices that have been continuing for an extremely prolonged stretch of time and make them more eco- accommodating and business cordial. The business has consistently depended on the idea of seasons like Spring Summer and Pre Winter. The patterns are chosen a year ahead of time, and they go into creation.
The more the business makes the better this structure will work, and that example will work—that prompts the unsold stock issue which the business faces. Myntra is upsetting the deep rooted practices of the style business with information and AI. It is currently ready to furnish brands with buyer bits of knowledge that considers the customers profile as well as factors can imagine their area, the climate designs, and what different shoppers with comparable boundaries are purchasing.
Myntra calls itself intelligent fast fashion as they know what you want and deliver the same to you, which goes with the founding principle of Myntra being democratizing fashion. And in the age of data interaction and experiences, data is fashion.
Author: PV Vyshnavi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/myntra-data-science/
Date : 2020-08-27T16:53:21.000Z