How Mustard, A Home Grown Fashion Label is Growing its Distribution Organically?

Founded in the year 2004 in India, Mustard is a fashion label. The apparel manufacturing and retail brand was established to provide classy western and chic contemporary Indian wears for women of different age groups and of all sizes. Each of Mustard’s designer collections brings the best of style, trend, and comfort. Mustard offers ready-to-wear garments for women in 10 different sizes from regular to plus as it understands the Indian body type better than any other brand. In an exclusive interaction with Saurabh Gupta-MD sheds light on different aspects of the brand.

What is you assessment about fashion and lifestyle market in India? According to you, what are the factors propelling growth in this market?

There’s great promise in India’s apparel market—but challenges as well.According to new research, the industry has grown 21% over the past three years. When compared to the luxury market, which saw mediocre growth in 2016, it’s clear that fast fashion retailers are growing in favor (Source: econsultancy.com). Given these dynamics we plan to take the store count to 100 in next 3 years.

How did Mustard Fashion started and journey so far? What were the initial challenges and how did you overcome them?

Launched in 2004, We, Mustard Clothing Company, are a garment manufacturing & retail company, consisting of diversely talented people carrying out our ever-growing operations.
Our factory is equipped with highly sophisticated machinery and we follow a modern system of production. We insist on constantly improvising the way the company thinks and the way it works, never losing focus on quality.

In the initial stages making available the complete size packall the time at the stores was the major challenge which was taken care by replenishing the stocks on daily basis & by airlifting them from the warehouse and we are the only company in India to do so. The other challenge we faced was from the vendors in terms of timely deliveries of the raw material due to small order quantities and we overcome this scenario by making the payments well in advance and gain the trust of our regular suppliers& vendors.

What is the current distribution of Mustard Fashion in the online as well as offline space? Going forward, what are the plans to scale-up the distribution?

Different customers not only have different shopping needs, but also different channel preferences. This is reason why the digital and physical worlds are truly blending. Hence we have O2O model in place to cater our service across nation. The future plan includes EBO’s and Franchisee’s model to offer our apparel nationwide and overseas.

What is your Omni channel strategy?

The goal of online-to-offline commerce is to create product and service awareness online, allowing potential customers to research different offerings and then tempting them enough to visit the stores to make a purchase. We solved the problem through live inventory updates and smart order allocation technique using effective technology.

Have you raised any sorts of funds so far or plan to?

Not yet since the growth up till now has been through debtand by internal accruals. Yes we do plan to raise funds in near future to fuel further growth of the brand.

Kindly tell us about best-selling categories and average sale points? Going forward, what are the plans for category expansion?

Mustard’s best-selling categories are kurtis, tops, denims, jackets & cardigan with the price points from Rs.1599 to Rs.4599. We have recently introduced Festive and Indian party wear categories.

What is your vision for 2020?

Our expertise in using innovation and technology to create customer experiences combined with an "unmatched reach" has made us as”partner of choice for Lifestyle of Indian women.” Our vision is to offer seamless shopping experience to our customers,strategic collaborations on loyalty programs and customer engagement activities, which in turn have enabled us to retain our customers.