What Jiten Mahendra teaches about brand purpose

So in fact this whole thing initially of brands thinking that if your offline customer gets exposed to online, it's gonna be a problem. An online customer is a discount seeker and offline customer is an experience seeker. It was a myth actually. A major part of being a successful fashion brand today is about catering to the youth, you know, college students, working professionals. So how do you ensure that you, you know, stay on top of all kinds of fashion trends and yet remain at a competitive price point?

So, you know, fashion, if you have to be a fashion player, it's given that you need to be on trend and we have a very strong design team. So we have a team of around 50 designers for based out of our office who actually do the trend prediction. And our trend predictions are very much robust right from, you know, you know, softwares like WGS and so and so on. Vis-a-vis travelling to markets and trade fairs in Europe and UK and so and so on. So there's a lot of detailing which goes in also keeping in the Bollywood trends.

So we have a special section called Bollywood trends. Okay. What we are realizing over the period we started as a 25 to 34 main family contemporary family brand, but slowly youth picked up and youth has a very, very, you know, different challenge altogether. They have more occasions to look good and they have a constraint in terms of the value. Right. And that's where brands like us are the most look forward to. So I would say that our youth contribution is among the highest in the category because of the sheer price point and the trend which we bring.

It's a very sweet spot to be in and the whole proposition of the brand is everyday fashion. So it is not a occasion where brand is not a Diwali may you shop from here. So we are talking about everyday. So how have you been or have you been able to leverage influencers to increase brand recall? So our journey with influencers started five years back. Okay. And this whole definition of influencer has gone through a change, you know. So initially influencer was a someone who is on a social handle. Then the definition became broader.

Even a celeb is a influencer. We took a different route. We got inspired by the new channels. We said that if reporters are reporting from so many locations, okay, and how can we do something like that? And we came up with the concept called student influencers. Oh. So as we talk right now, we are doing a youth campaign, GenMe campaign right now. We have 200 students who are working as an influencer with us. Okay. Through our content agency. Oh. And we have identified them based on the city, based on the colleges, based on their social handle. Hmm.

And content is not just sharing information. Content is co-creating. So now what we have done is that we have identified bloggers. There are celebs. So celebs are more like publishing and saliency for reach purpose. Whereas when you have to do qualitative aspect, there are domain experts. Hmm. And then when you have to do relatability, there is this whole student piece which is working quite strongly with us. And that's helping us. So our program has evolved over the period.

So, you know, given the onslaught of e-commerce warriors, so how has your omnichannel strategy been? So, you know, it is evolving. Hmm. What it was, what it is right now, what is going to be, is going to be a journey. And we are learning a lot of it. So e-commerce has helped us to further increase our penetration. We see in our loyalty program, people who are shopping online as well as offline, their businesses are far better. Their department penetrations are better. Their bill values are better. Their repeat is better. Their stickiness is better.

So in fact, this whole thing initially of brands thinking that if your offline customer gets exposed to online, it's going to be a problem. An online customer is a discount seeker and offline customer is an experience seeker. It was a myth actually. E-commerce helped people to understand category. And obviously the end user has benefited a lot. Customers have more time now to research. Hmm. It's more informed purchase because lot of information is available. So we are talking about ROPO research online and purchase offline. Right.

That's I think thanks to the e-commerce. So if I have to nutshell put it up, e-commerce educated the customer about different product categories which are available. Defined the occasion. Got them, you know, the information which is required to do a purchase. So they it played a very important curation apart. The, the chance the, the areas which the brands have to straddle is the discounting piece. How do you create an engagement and a community and not do a transactional conversation which is difficult to sustain.

But yeah, overall it's gonna be an omni world. Customer is going to shop from everywhere. It is not the brands which have to figure out how they want to unify the whole journey. So, is there any major business challenge that you want to overcome, you know, and which will actually catapult you to the next level of growth. So I, I think it's a industry challenge more than a max challenge. Okay. The unification of experiences, the omni channel piece. I think everybody is working on omni channel.

What is happening is that we need to get our brick and mortar, the offline base to the online. Because they are our loyal customers. So if you look at major retailers, almost 50 to 60% of their business is coming from loyalty. Now, how do you translate the loyal customer who is offline online? So today, if you look at conversion is one of a key factor in retail. That means 100 people enter and around 25 to 30 people buy. Now, the one of the key thing is that the product is not available or the size not available or the color not available.

And you will be surprised it is exactly available in a store which is 2 kilometer away. But the customer is not getting it. So we are working on the single view inventory unifying. So the moment the customer comes and if he or she doesn't get what he wants, she can shop maxfashion.com. And the CRE is doing. So the customer doesn't do. The CRE is working on incentivizing them to place the order. So the customer get what he wants and gets delivered. CRM is becoming more social.

So if you look at the current CRM structure of most of the organization, it is based on the past behavior. We are trying to build it on the intended purchase. And social media helps us a lot to understand the intended purchase. So that's one of the things. So the stock piece, the social CRM piece and the unifying of the experience is what we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on.

So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on. So that's one of the things we are actually working on.

So that's one of the things we are actually working on.