Sustainable ethnicity with empowered artisans, Mirraw’s aim to rule the industry

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Anup Nair, Co-founder at Mirraw

• What are the marketing strategies Mirraw is using to drive traffic to the website?

Mirraw is India’s leading ethnic wear marketplace. As such, we believe in curating the best collection for customers and guiding the customer to achieving that perfect ethnic look for an occasion. Our brand therefore believes in adding value to customers’ lives with information, tips and guidance on fashion and styling ethnic outfits. We start with a set of problems that customers face like full outfit creation, matching accessories to outfits, mix and match Indian with western outfits and right outfit for the right body shape and then we provide informational solutions for these problems. By creating value generating content we have been able to build a great community that trusts us with these recommendations. After having found the right value content that works for our audience, we then apply the tactics of performance marketing to scale these content pieces and lo and behold they convert.

• How does Mirraw’s innovative technology help streamline the supply chain? What are the innovative approaches to managing the supply chain in e-commerce?

We face 2 unique challenges due to our marketplace exports model. For instance, if a USA customer buys 3 items from 3 different brands who are located across India, we can’t just ship 3 different shipments directly to the USA. So, we aggregate the shipments to our warehouse in Mumbai and repackage it into a single shipment. This JIT fetch of the products adds a delay to the overall delivery to the USA. This problem we optimize by running predictive analytics on the marketplace to identify which items are high frequency purchases and then pre fetch those items to our warehouse. Additionally, items stored in our warehouse get promoted as ‘Ready to Ship’ thereby completing the cycle of pushing more items which have zero dispatch delay.

We also provide customization of the products according to the customers size and fit. We offer bespoke customization i.e tailored to ones need for lehengas, saree blouses, and salwar suits completely online. Customers provide measurements to us online and we provide personalized styling consultation to them to ensure perfect fit. To do this over a scale of 1000s of customers a month requires tedious process management and automated systems to reduce errors. We have a 3 step quality check and a customer rating process that is directly linked backed to the individual tailor ( i.e. we get a quality score for each tailor’s performance directly based on customer feedback. ) Using this we are able to manage an army of 50 odd tailors. Not sure of the industry but I think we are the only ones doing bespoke individual customization at this scale.

• What is the key driving driver in the e-commerce Analytics Market, and how is Mirraw coping with it?

The biggest challenge in Ecommerce Marketing is Attribution. Consider this scenario where a customer sees your brand ad on an Instagram Story and follows your page. Few days later she sees a post from your page and visits the site. They then receive an email followup with an offer that works only if they download the app. And finally they make a purchase on the app. Success of acquiring this customer is distributed over multiple steps and channels. So the hardest part of ecommerce marketing is tracking a customer’s journey and ensuring that the right paths are laid out correctly. Too often false asumptions has been made that Instagram Stories has no effect. While this problem has been prevalent for the last decade, the complexity of it has increased due to increased social media channels and touchpoints.

Mirraw has a dedicated Customer Lifecycle Management team and process who leverage the latest tools in the market like Clevertap, Branch etc. to track the customers journey and to correctly attribute the purchase back to the relevant campaign. Using a Recency Frequency Monetary model we segment customers into relevant buckets and create unique journeys for them.

• Why should eCommerce Analytics be taken seriously, and why should eCommerce firms adopt a data-driven culture?

As answered above, it aids in segmentation of customers.

Marketing has addvanced significantly from the invest and pray model of TV advertising. Today we have control over exactly whom to show what ad and what product to. The more we build using this model the more accurate it gets. Too often Brand Managers come up with overarching campaigns that work for all customers and segments and ignore the associated data points. This reasoning is based on a thinking that it takes months to prepare for a brand campaign, so there’s no way we can iterate on it.

However, influencers on social media have shown the proof of iterative content creation on a daily basis. All influencers start out with low effort posts before determining what is effective for their audience. That is a data driven approach, where they are monitoring analytics on each of the content pieces that they create. The likes, shares and comments guide them in the right direction of amazing content as opposed to the expertise of a director/brand expert. It is the age of the millennial and their models of quick and iterative posting, combined with systematic data analysis is what’s needed for every brand.

• How will generative AI change e-commerce? What are the Possible applications?

Generative AI holds immense potential for solving a lot of processes that are currently manual.

Contact center will be able to answer and respond to queries like a human . The ability to understand complex queries and tricky situations has improved a lot in the past few years and hence, it holds promise in being able to tackle customer queries correctly.

Creation of new listings

Creative Product titles and descriptions can be done based on user and preferences. It no longer  needs to be static. Photo shoots of the product will completely change. Model shoots can be completely AI generated. This enables us to take the same product and showcase it on multiple different skin tones, body shapes and sizes. New designs for products can be auto generated and pre-orders can be taken. This reduces risk of inventory