With an aim to digitally enable seamless availability of innovative ‘maternity wear’ designs for its customers in India, Abiti Bella is able to create a unique niche for itself. The company is riding high on India’s e-commerce wave in order to deliver unique value propositions to its customer base. Today, the company’s brand is available at all the leading e-commerce websites in the country.
Rakhi Khera, Managing Director, Abiti Bella speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the journey of the organization and how the road looks ahead for the company.
What are the key focus areas where your online venture is focusing around?
Abiti Bella Enterprises represents an “Online Only” brand for women’s wear. This is available to be purchased in India and also in USA through amazon.com. It is largely focused on western wear and Maternity wear through brands “Abiti Bella” and “Mine4Nine” respectively.
Abiti Bella means “Clothes Beautiful” in French. As an organization, thriving on innovation, we want to connect a cord with all such beautiful girls and women and accomplish their innate desire to be dressed beautifully. And hence all our designs carry a blend of global vogue & local trends. The array of clothing is in an affordable range to help you flaunt your style without spending a fortune for it!
What are some of the big market differentiations that it is bringing for the end customers?
Global designs, Superior quality at affordable prices: The “private label” online market is largely tilted towards class B and class C cities in India where finding branded clothes is a challenge and affordability is also a major concern. Abiti Bella is high on Style and Quality and does not pinch your pocket. The ASP is in the range of INR 800-900.
Style refresh: Abiti Bella continuously keeps refreshing its catalogue with new styles and design which most of the sellers do. However as a differentiation , it continues to pull out few designs every month even if some of them are selling fast. This allows regular customers to see fresh listings every time they visit Abiti Bella online.
“ZERO” order pendency: as a policy the inventories listed on the websites are the factual physical in hand inventory, so the lead time is NIL.
PERONALISED services and Customer priority: the management is highly customer oriented and walked extra mile many a times to create “Customer Delight”.
Superior Catalogue: Abiti Bella is using the best in industry services for creating its online catalogue, The catalogue is its first interaction with the prospective customer so it has to be the best.
Focus on MATERNITY Segment
Affordability: Maternity wear is a Niche segment and has penetrated only in limited geographies and segments in India. We have kept the prices affordable to create first time buyers.
STYLE: the Mantra of Mine4Nine is “Get rid of Boring wardrobe during pregnancy, this is the best phase of womanhood, so look your best” The maternity brand Mine4Nine is a breath of fresh air for “Moms to be”. Mine4Nine clothes are designed to flatter the expecting mom, not let them compromise. So it has prints, laces and all other designs which are possible and available for women otherwise.
COMFORT: Extra care is taken while choosing designs and fabric to make the moms to be comfortable in what they choose and also to accommodate the swift changes in the body from trimester to trimester.
What kind of revenue model do you have for your venture?
The biggest revenue share comes to us from Marketplace sale, which amounts for almost 90% of the revenues, we have not started yet selling through our website as it requires tremendous amount of dollars to popularize the same but it is going to be done soon.
We want to ride on the success of bigger marketplaces and heavy marketing spend they are making to get customers on their websites. This allows us to utilise the best of them. This also de-risks us from their respective individual risk factors.
We highly encourage online model only, however, we have experimented with some “in store” sale and institution sale as well. This will continue.
We use few platforms to dispose the low selling styles on platforms like Groupon, we also would explore other B2C platforms like Surpluss.in for this purpose.
Please share your plans to grow in the market?
The revenue per month is directly proportional to the no of styles available at given point of time, we intend to add average 25 new styles every month for next 12-18 month, by end of 2016, we will have 500 designs running at any given instance. This will help us drastically enhance our revenue streams.
The market for maternity wear is expanding very fast, it stands at close to 1000 crore currently with no visible brand leadership as of now. We plan to invest heavily in this category over next 12 months. For this segment, we want to become top 3 brands by revenue, by end of 2016.
Right mix of Breadth and depth of inventory: This is a critical success factor in online business as the scalability is very high. Over last few years many brands have entered this arena but only few are able to make a name and run it profitably due to heavy inventory pile ups and inability to sell them in reasonable duration. Abiti bella believes in a “Dip Stick” methodology where we check success of each style and quickly create deep inventories of successful styles.
We are an early adapter of technology and we use Cloud for our Inventory and invoice management which has brought high accuracy and efficiencies for us. We will continue investing in this to help us cope the scalability issues. Also, We have outsourced manufacturing, Finance functions to help us achieve scalabilities, this also helps us focus more on the marketing aspects and create more pull for our brand.
We are a small team right now and we intend to strengthen the team in Finance, Merchandising and Marketplace operations. Further, we intend to expand our horizon to other sub categories under “women’s wear” including Ethnic wear and sarees.
How big is your user community today and what are your plans to increase the number of users on your platform?
We are available on all leading marketplaces which put together amount for 80% lifestyle online buyers, we have touched almost 15000 unique customers so far across the country. For last few months we are enhancing our database for digital marketing to promote repeat buyers. We intend to engage them through various promotional activities. We can create loyalty based promotion once our website is operational.
Getting brand recall from end customer is a big challenge as you remain behind the scene. However, we intend to have at least 20%-25% customer to have repeat purchase.
What is your go to market strategy, please share details of your partner ecosystem?
We want to remain focused on Marketplace Sale. However, very soon we will start our website for exhibiting our collection online. We are soon going to tie up with Mobile Marketplace like PayTM and Niche Marketplace like Firstcry for our maternity brand. We will keep a right mix of Large (like women wear) and Niche (Maternity wear) segments for our plan.
Marketplace links
INDIA shipping
MYNTRA : http://goo.gl/lfKjh1
FLIPKART : http://goo.gl/WBxiap
JABONG : http://goo.gl/90ZdMq
AMAZON.in : http://goo.gl/Q3aP2p
SNAPDEAL : http://goo.gl/fm5wFU
LIMEROAD : http://goo.gl/b4YBxK
USA shipping
AMAZON.com : http://goo.gl/lfl7Ox
