Over 8 million customers expected to shop during Myntra's festive sale

Walmart-owned online fashion retailer Myntra is expecting over 8 million customers to shop during its flagship sale event, Big Fashion Festival (BFF), next month. Last year, about 6 million customers shopped during the event.

"We expect around 40 per cent to 45 per cent of the demand coming from Tier-II and Tier-III cities and towns. The demand is steadily moving up," said Nandita Sinha, chief executive officer at Myntra, in an interview.

With over 23 lakh styles from more than 6000 brands, the fourth edition of the Myntra BFF offers one of the biggest assortments of selections across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle ever. Over 5 lakh new styles have been added from brands that are popular among non-metro customers.

"The new things we are bringing to our customers this year include helping scale beauty and personal care as a category; it's been very important for us," said Sinha. "In the beauty category, we've grown almost 3x of the market. But we will continue to grow on this one and have almost 90,000 styles and brands, of which 300 brands will be participating for the first time. Events like BFF serve as an opportunity for these brands to drive scale. Helping them get an opportunity to drive this kind of growth is very exciting."

To meet the expected surge in traffic and provide a seamless shopping journey to consumers coming to the platform, Myntra has scaled its systems to handle about 1 million concurrent users at peak.

The platform has unique hero collections for 'BFF Specials' along with over 150 new launches, cross-brand collaborations, and interesting CelebXBrand crossovers. In addition to fashion and beauty, some of the emerging categories geared to witness rising demand this festive season include home products, luggage, travel and accessories, footwear, and handbags.

This BFF will see over 1.6 lakh styles and 50 new made-in-India D2C (direct-to-consumer) brands, which come under the Myntra Rising Stars banner. Some of these brands include Outcast, Nap Chief, BeYours, and Veshti Company. The D2C segment has witnessed 70 per cent year-on-year growth this quarter on Myntra.

Indian wear has been scaled to 4.5 lakh styles from 3.4 lakh styles last festive season, to cater to the rising demand ahead of the Big Fashion Festival. During Rakhi, Onam, and Ganesh Chaturthi, the company witnessed high demand for this segment, with customers' fashion choices being skewed towards co-ord sets, which has recorded a year-on-year growth of over 100 per cent. Fusion collections, which comprise 45,000 styles from 1000 brands, are expected to trend among Gen Z customers looking for an Indo-western look.

Myntra has added over 20 international brands launched this year that are also participating in BFF for the first time, along with a portfolio of 400 global brands. Some recently on-boarded brands include Anko, Saucony, Gymshark, Champion, BoohooMAN, DKNY, and Anne Klein. The selection available on Myntra Beauty has grown by over 4x from 2020.

Myntra has also scaled up its fashion tech innovations. "We have a lot of innovations this year, which include 'MyFashionGPT' and 'My Stylist'. We have just launched Maya, an AI-powered conversational commerce tool," said Sinha. "These innovations help customers bridge the gap of having a stylist or finding the right product for the right occasion. This is all AI-powered."

As part of the festive hiring ramp-up, Myntra will increase women hiring, taking it to over 21 per cent higher than last year's festive season. This drive seeks to engage women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and extend opportunities for means of livelihood. Also, Myntra said its kirana network Mensa (Myntra Extended Network for Service Augmentation), consisting of 17,000 partners, will play a pivotal role in fulfilling festive orders across the country.

• Expects 8 million customers to shop during the event
• Early indicators from Rakhi, Onam and Ganesh Chaturthi show heightened interest from consumers for products across fashion, beauty and lifestyle
• Strengthened the product mix for non-metro customers with 5 lakh new products
• D2C category on the platform has witnessed 70% YoY growth this quarter
• In the run-up to the festive season, the company scaled up its women hiring in the supply chain and contact centre by 21%
• Myntra is associated with 17000 Kirana stores and delivers across 19000 pin codes