There Are Three New Trends
In Your Cart
Online retail is doing its bit to woo women customers: from offering
designer wear at discounted prices (or lingerie that fits all sizes), to
preparing customised looks for shoppers
1 Shop for looks that are tailored for you
Should I buy the red A-line dress or
the blue maxi for my next office party? The black wedges or the brown pumps?
What about accessories – the little golden clutch or the silver sling bag?’ If
you also go through such dilemmas while shopping online, there is some good
news. A few of the newer websites now provide entire looks styled around themes
and occasions, and some even suggest wardrobes based on your measurements –
customised by stylists, fashion experts, and regular style-conscious users.
On LimeRoad.com, you will find
beautiful scrapbooks of some of the most fashionable trends of the season,
which look right out of the pages of a glossy fashion magazine. What such
scrapbooks really do is assemble different pieces of a complete outfit – shoes,
accessories, bags et al – in one place, and save you the trouble of piecing
together the jigsaw style puzzle. One scrapbook called “Garden Party”, for
example, suggests a printed red dress, a pair of beige heels and a pearl
necklace in one pretty look that you can wear to, well, a garden party! “We
have a strong community of scrapbookers who are essentially helping brands to
make their products look gorgeous, and thereby reach out to millions of
potential buyers. The community posted nearly two million style statements as
scrapbooks last month alone,” says Suchi Mukherjee, founder and CEO of
LimeRoad.
The site has a “style council” with
23 influencers like actress Neha Dhupia and several fashion bloggers who
inspire and support the scrapbooking community. “Our Style Council is also
about acceptance of different style ideologies. So we’ve got on board a very
interesting bunch of women – from the young singing sensation Barbie Rajput and
India’s youngest female bike stunt athlete Anam Hashim to celebrity makeup
artist Heema Dattani, amongst others.”
Another e-com portal called
20Dresses.com has two in-house experts who help you figure out the right look
for you based on a quiz that assesses your body type, your complexion, your
vital stats, and the kind of styles you like. “The style quiz is designed to
get a basic understanding of our customer’s fashion profile,” says Sneha Singh,
one of the style experts at 20Dresses. “Through a series of fun, playful and
visual questions we get to know about our members’ fashion preferences and body
profile. Our personalisation offerings coupled with real time styling support
has helped thousands of members efficiently make their buying decisions. The
overall experience of product selection, styling help and personalisation has
struck a chord with our members.”
Roposo.com is another website and
mobile app where regular users, like you and me, put up photos of themselves
sporting the things that they buy on the site, so that you get an idea of what
the outfit looks like in real life, how well it fits, how good it looks paired
with other products and the like. Cofounder Mayank Bhangadia calls it a social
network for fashion. “Whenever someone is wearing something she bought off the
site, she can post a photo of it, and other users can comment on that,” he
says. “Other fashion-conscious women can actually post longer ‘stories’ about
say, how you can wear a crop top in five different ways, or DIY posts on how
you can transform your old pair of jeans into a tote bag.”
2 Glam up that lingerie drawer
Haven’t you squirmed and squirmed
some more while trying to explain just what kind of bra you wanted to wear
under that halter top to your friendly neighbourhood bra salesman? Or tried to
find the right size at the big branded store that just keeps the four sizes all
Indian women are “supposed” to fit in? Online lingerie shopping has drastically
changed the way Indian women shop for that “essential” commodity.
eyes,” says Smita Murarka, head of
marketing and e-commerce of Amante. “Another great thing about shopping online
is that all the trends are available in all different sizes — that’s because
there isn’t a space problem as compared to the big branded stores.”
Most websites have a comprehensive sizing
mechanism to help the customer, but if you still end up with a bra that doesn’t
fit, you can always just send it back. “The exchange rules are much more
flexible online. That’s because online stores know they lack of the try-and-buy
system, so they make up for it with return policies. The lingerie outlets in
stores have just about four sizes because of space constraints, so they try and
convince the customer that that’s the size to go for, and so, many Indian women
end up wearing the wrong size,” says Karan Behal, founder and CEO of Pretty
Secrets. He has also noticed a few other trends that point towards the changing
aesthetic of the Indian woman. “We sell more bikinis than one pieces, and more
push-ups than minimisers. If 50 per cent of our traffic is from the big cities,
the other 50 per cent comes from smaller two-II cities, who now want to be
trendy,” he says. “It’s not a utility product any more. And the only platform
that is catering to the growing demands of the customer is online.”
3 Designer fix for peanuts
That Shivan & Narresh bikini you
have been wanting ever since you saw your favourite celebrity wearing it in
that fashion magazine? Or that Nishka Lulla beach skirt you’ve been dying to
get your hands on? You can buy them now, for maybe a fraction of the price.
Designer wear is now online and is right within your reach.
On Stylista.com, for example, a
one-stop shop for buying designer wear online, you can buy a Shivan &
Narresh swimsuit for 3,150, a Masaba dress for the same price and a Wendell
Rodricks jacket for just 1,475, which would usually cost above 15,000. “When we
first conceptualised Stylista, the aim was to make designer wear affordable and
accessible,” says Amtosh Singh, business head at Stylista. “What we do is this:
the designer designs exclusively for Stylista and we produce it in the Stylista
factory. Designers usually just produce 10-15 outfits of each style, but we
mass-produce and come up with at least 50 samples of each design. That’s how we
control costs.” Stylista has a mix of new, mid-rung and established designers
and as Singh says, focuses on quality. It also has an even cheaper alternative
in their Stylista Select and Stylista Original brands.
On NETE.in, you can shop from edgy
designer brands like Huemn for 5,000 and below. Many designers now create prêt
lines exclusively for online retailing, and hence keep the costs low. NETE
founder Mariya Khanji Timbadia has an important observation, “When you are
shopping for designer wear, you want to think about it properly. Online portals
give you the liberty to come back again and again, until you’re absolutely
sure.” She also points out that at most times, e-commerce websites have clothes
on sale. “So you are getting an even better deal.”
HTBR19JUL15
No comments:
Post a Comment