The Myntra Success Mantra

Mukesh Bansal, CEO, Myntra.com founded the company in February 2007 and started as a personalized portal of products. He discusses his recent moves and ties up with the sports brands and thereby launch of separate sport category for its buyers. His company is also expanding aggressively into a complete fashion lifestyle retailing, across all ages and groups. Mukesh shares the roadmap and the response of World cup fever to his business with Avinder Batra. Here are the excerpts.

AB: What is Myntra.com all about?
MB: We are an online e-commerce portal, which deals in fashion lifestyle retailing. We initiated the business as personalization portal and had a catalog of products which could be customized such as T-shirts, mugs, jersey. Three months ago we launched our sports lifestyle catalog for our consumers. And have tied up with Nike, Reebok, Adidas etc and gradually we are developing the lifestyle fashion category. Youth wear, Sports-wear, Casual wear, footwear etc all are in the pipeline.

AB: Recently you have tied up with Nike. The World cup fever is growing like wild fire, how are you encashing the opportunity?
MB: As the world cup fever is building up, our partnership with Nike is doing very well. Huge jump in selling the jerseys approximately 500-600 per day as compare to normal day selling of 30-40 only. Our sales has surged almost 10 times and at this point of time we are facing the shortage of stock with we are effectively dealing with. Lot of people in India like to watch match sitting at home with their names at the back of the jersey.

AB: How do you build that hype around the event?
MB: We have been doing lot of advertisements on radio, prints, online especially in Delhi, Bangalore cities.

AB:How much is the budget assigned to it?
MB: It is close to 1.5 crores for this World cup.

AB: Which age group usually visits your portal?
MB: 21-25 years who are young and bachelors and the others are from 30-35 years who have small family with kids. Since we are expanding our portfolio so people wants to customize the name of their family members especially on mugs, t-shirts etc. That is why we are building up a huge range of fashion lifestyle portfolio for our customer base.

AB: How would you go for your marketing strategy What would your budget?
MB: We would advertise in prints, radios and also gradually go for TV commercials. Approximately we have lined up the budget of 10 crores.

AB:Who are your regular buyers and the price points with sell?
MB: Price range from Rs 400 to Rs 2500.  Our larger categories that popularly sell (in the descending order) are—sport jerseys, T-shirts, mugs, track pants, footwear.

AB: What was the concept that went into to start with the customized products?
MB: Inspiration was from outside India where companies have lot of personalized products. We felt that the idea is very powerful to build the concept around it. Customers can give their own inputs to make the products for them. But we also want to go beyond personalization. We started with sports lifestyle because we have been selling lot of sports products where we got phenomenal response.

AB: How do you position your discount strategy vis-a vis brick and mortar store?

MB: We deal in current season merchandise. So there is not much price difference but we offer other benefits-- information about the brand or the product, you can buy the product irrespective of the place you are residing. Other  online portal deals with the merchandise just to liquidate the leftover stock.

AB: How is your distribution network? How challenging is it?
MB: We try to dispose the product within 24 hours and it has been a challenging job. Our team is working on automation. We have a very large warehouse in Bangalore where we keep our stock. It takes 2-4 days is the maximum.

AB: Any other developments you would like to share with us?
MB: We are developing lots of customer engaging activities—for Team India jersey we have launched an application on the facebook where you virtually purchase the Team India jersey and support the country and then we have around 4,80000 fan following.