What Tanvi Malik teaches about brand purpose

It was started with this unique insight is that it is international global fashion uniquely tailored for the Indian woman. Hi Tanvi, give us a quick peek into Fabali. How is it different from other players in the market? So, Fabali was started by my co-founder Shivani and I in 2012 and it was started with this unique insight which is something that is still powering us and something that ensures that we remain different from other brands in our space is that it is international global fashion uniquely tailored for the Indian woman.

When we started we saw that there was a big vacuum of fashion brands that were looking at outward, that were looking at what the West was doing, what counterpoints in US and Italy and Europe, all of these women, what were they wearing and what we were getting in India. So, there was this huge gap and it was especially a huge gap at an affordable price point. So, that is precisely where Fabali came in with this thought that we will, the fashion that you are exposed to

in terms of what you are reading, what you see on the internet is the fashion that we will be bringing to you. But the filter, the filter, the umbrella that we put was that we will bring it to you for you. So, one of the biggest challenges for most online players is stickiness. How do you ensure that customers keep coming back? Okay, so this is not a one size fit all. I mean there are multiple ways to, you know, get customers to keep coming back and browsing.

I think the fundamental, the core of it is being fast fashion to ensure that you have enough freshness on your website, on your, you know, in your stores, wherever you are, to ensure that customers have like some interest in like, you know, popping back in to see what's new.

The other thing is to always communicate that, you know, with working with influencers or working on strong branded content on, through Instagram, through Facebook, through all your other channels, to ensure that there is always some buzz around the brand that like makes you interested in what's happening.

Let me see, let me see, let me come back. And on a purely transactional financial level, for your loyal customers, for the segmentation that you can do, you can always reach out to them through emails, through push notifications, to get them to come back with us, incentivize their repeat visit, their repeat behavior.

So, we look at it like, you know, for our existing customers, we look at like, the recency of their visit, the frequency of how often they come to us, the monetary value that they spend on our website, and we target them accordingly. We incentivize them accordingly to revisit Fab Alley. Okay. How important is branded content for your brand and how do you use it as part of your marketing strategy? Can you share some examples?

So, I think, let's look at it as Fab Alley and India being two brands for millennials. And millennials are not consuming brands like how their generational predecessors did. Millennials don't want to be talked at. They want to engage with. They want to be inspired. They want to see something, hear something, and they want to discover. And for a brand, especially a fashion brand, it is very important to be culturally relevant to consumers who happen to be millennials at this point of time, right?

A lot of our campaigns are very content centric, very storytelling centric, with the millennial in our focus. For example, a couple of years ago, when stand-up comedy was breaking into, I mean, breaking into the mainstream, we actually worked with Radhika Vaz, who, you know, is one of the pioneers of the

brand, and also resonates very well with our brand, which is, you know, all about inclusivity and not stereotyping women and not falling into the same, you know, societal norms and bounds that like women are typically anticipated, typically expected to, you know, fall into. So we worked with her on a stand-up special. And that was interesting because not only was she resonating our values, she was someone who was, I mean, and we were doing it with comedy at our, you know, as our focus, as our medium.

It just sort of resonated with consumers, it amplified our brand's message, and we never had to explicitly sell Fabali. It was underlayed, overlayed with all that we were doing. And that's what we continue to do. Like we've had follow on campaigns after that, after unfollow, we did FabFitSource for Fabali, for India, we did I am India. And all of them have focused on personas on women that were strong and powerful and were talking about their lifestyle and incorporating brands as a by the way aspect.

Tell us about your second venture, which is India. What does it have to offer to the modern millennial woman? So with India, our insight was that we've come full circle. There was this entire phase of 90s and early noughties where, you know, women were rejecting their Indianness, where like Western values and influences were what was cooler. But come 2010s and late 2000s, we saw that there is a movement back to embracing Indianness. And that's something that we finally, you know, from our colonial beginnings,

finally found a balance between the Western exposure that we've had and the Indian rootedness that, you know, that we're born with. And we see pride in that. So India as a brand actually marries the two. We saw that like a lot of Indian wear brands were becoming more like cultural costumes, like something you'd wear to a temple, something you'd wear to a wedding or something you'd wear to a Diwali party or things like that, as opposed to being a regular wear.

And the reason was that women were not looking at, millennials were not looking at Salwar kameez. They did not speak to these women. That's not, you know, who we wanted to be. And a brand needed to come, which fused the two thoughts of West and East and, you know, made Indian wear more contemporary and more suitable to millennial women. And that's how the brand India was born. And even the name itself, it's India with a twist with a modernization.