Myntra is expecting a 1.8X increase in traffic during its upcoming Big Fashion Festival sale, will focus more on regional and influencer marketing to engage with consumers

• Myntra is confident its this year's edition of Big Fashion Festival will be its biggest ever in terms of demand and the number of people it is able to reach.
• We speak to Amar Nagaram, CEO, Myntra who tells us about his expectations from the upcoming festive season and what are a few things that will help them increase traffic by 1.8X increase over the previous edition.

We’re just a few days away from Dussehra and Durga Puja which is a major festival in large parts of India and Myntra is gearing up for what it feels will be its biggest fashion festival yet.

The platform revealed that it is expecting close to 5.5 million unique customers to shop during its upcoming Big Fashion Festival, which is a 1.8X increase in traffic over the previous edition. The pandemic has made more and more people comfortable with shopping online, a trend that has seen many new users come on board as first-time users. Myntra too expects around 1.1 million unique first-time customers to shop on its platform during the festive period this year. In fact, it is not the bigger cities that are contributing to the demand, smaller cities are increasingly shopping from the platform too. In fact, Myntra expects to see close to 40% of the contribution come in from Tier 2-3 markets. It is expecting to see an overall uptick in demand, at 4X over BAU and 1.6X over the last festive season.

“We’ve seen a good momentum since Ganesh Chaturthi. There is a lot of interest coming back into fashion buying and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, the vaccination rate has gone up in the country so people are getting comfortable with stepping out. Offices are slowly opening up. And the festive season has always been important for fashion. We have witnessed a visible shift towards online fashion. We got introduced to a lot of new markets due to the pandemic and this new segment of users we had on-boarded then hasn’t left us. Consumers even in Tier II and Tier III cities are gaining trust. People have now experienced and are comfortable with online shopping. Due to all these factors, we are confident that this will be a very big season for us,” shared Amar Nagaram, CEO, Myntra.

Owing to the kind of demand it is witnessing from smaller cities, the platform is also pivoting its marketing and spending more on regional. It is not only on-boarding regional stars to reach out to these new consumers, it is also coming up with more regional content, regional selection as well as customer support.

Having said that, the platform hasn’t really increased its marketing spends but is cleverly utilizing its budgets to do more regional and targeted marketing. “Till a few years back, we used to do one big campaign for the entire country. Now we have one campaign per region, so the net marketing investment is still the same for us but the way we approach marketing has changed phenomenally. We are spending a substantial part of our budget on influencers too. In fact, we have over 2000 influencers creating content for us across languages and regions. The relationship between a brand and a consumer is no longer a two-party relationship, rather it's a three party relationship with the influencer playing a very critical role. Therefore, its not just the network of influencers that we're building, we’re also building Myntra Studio which is a platform to showcase fashion-centric content created by influencers on our own platform,” he explained.

Nagaram also expects the platform to witness 15,000 orders per minute during the peak of the season and is ramping up its tech capabilities too. It has increased the number of brands on the platform by 40% over the previous edition and has also scaled up its kirana network by 30%, taking store count to 25,000 stores. Over 70% of the festive deliveries across the country are expected to be undertaken by its kirana network partners.

Myntra has also strengthened its supply chain network across the country, with the addition of 1 fulfilment centre (FC), 3 mother hubs, 12 satellite hubs, and 171 distribution centres to significantly enhance capacity for higher storage volumes and to optimize last-mile deliveries further.