Fashion is such a powerful word, it can change the world. If not change the world it can at least make some people rich. When it comes to fashion, the world follows the crowd. If some trend gets enough people hooked, then the trend has the chance of becoming a fashion trend. Which are longer and wider terms in magnitude and effects. There can be many sorts of fashion, each sort of fashion has the potential to influence a large number of people.
This trait of the fashion industry makes it one of the hottest industries out there. This is the reason fashion houses and fashion retails are always out there, innovating and figuring out something that will hopefully become a trend and a fashion statement. In the modern world, the apocalyptic 21st century, the internet and technology are the lead workers in almost every industry.
Fashion is also run by these workersā hands. Indiaās topmost online fashion delivery partner Myntra is also doing the same. They are working on recommendation systems at a large scale. Like in-session intent, explore-exploit algorithms diversity, deep personalisation, identifying fashion trends, etc. This article talks about this topic at the heart. First, let us see how the world of fashion operates and how it is changing with the help of AI and big data.
The World of Fashion, Then and Now
Myntra – The Fashion Retail
How Myntra Uses Data Science to Provide Unparalleled Customer Experience?
How Data Plays an Important Role in Improving Customer Experience at Myntra?
How is Myntra using Growth Hacking?
Why is Myntra Investing in Machine Learning?
The World of Fashion, Then and Now
Fashion, by definition, is anything that someone wears to make a style statement. The definition might look easy in theory but in practice, the word āfashionā has a lot of potentials. This can take any shape and size, and this can make truckloads of money if it is directed in a good right direction.
The cycle of fashion mostly starts when people observe some influential person making a style statement. Then they look out for the same thing, to make the same style statement. Take the case of Luxottica. The famous luxury eyewear group enjoys a monopoly in the eyewear industry. It all started when the brand pulled in some actors and designers to promote luxury frames. This was an instant hit and the beginning of huge cash flows.
By now, you must have understood that the world of fashion is unique and full of potential. Ā There are many sorts of fashion, they can be categorised into many categories. Then comes the more famous sort of fashion line, fast fashion. As the name suggests, it is fast in nature. It comes quickly and goes out of fashion quickly. Zara is probably the best example of fast-fashion retail. Ā
The next and the newest form of fashion is all new. Fashion when mixed with data analytics becomes a whole new domain of work. When fashion is added with the benefits of data and technology, it becomes wider. The reach now covers much more area than before and so do the profits that occur. This is what fashion companies like Myntra are doing. Let us see Myntraās data science and the work that goes behind the curtains/website.
Myntra – The Fashion Retail
Myntra is a popular name among fashion enthusiasts. By āfashion enthusiastsā we mean quite everyone. Everyone wants to make a style statement and everyone wants to stand out. In this sort of environment, Myntra is a perfect destination for these people. It is a place that caters to a lot of demands in a single and simple setting. A single stop for all things fashion.
As the world grows and becomes more and more hyperconnected, and people want more personalised stuff, Myntra is changing its model too. It is not just a fashion company now, it is adding data and technology to its structure. With the aid of data technology, the brand can put itself as a more personalised fashion retail for its consumers. Which if done right, can lead to great success for the brand.
Right, now the fashion company deals in all sorts of fashion products. As time passes, it is also trying to enter the world of technology of personalisations. Personalisations like large scale recommendation systems can add a lot of brand value to the company. It is working in this direction with all its might, to get to a position where it is easy for consumers to get products that meet their personal demands.
Just like Netflix which used user data to give out personal recommendations for movies and series. In the next paragraph, we will read about the efforts that the company is trying to get deep into data technology.
How Myntra Uses Data Science to Provide Unparalleled Customer Experience?
If you say that Myntra is fashion retail, you are right but not entirely. Myntra is more of a data science company that works on data to provide personalisations to its customers. It is, in fact, one of the biggest and most successful data science teams in the country. The reason is that Myntra is hugely investing in its data science wing, to improve the overall experience.
The data science team is the reason, on which the company is making all its newfound progress. It is in fact the reason which even helps big service companies like Netflix to grow on customer experience. The majority of the features that the fashion company now provides are AB tested. These solutions that provide great personalisations were never possible in the past but they are now the nearest possibility. Thanks to data tech.
At the core of Myntra, the company wants to create an exceptional consumer interface that is so useful that people will become loyal to the brand. The data science team at the fashion retail has solutions for that goal problem. They want to create a unique model at every touchpoint where the user reaches for his/her needs. These models/differentiators will help increase the consumer experience and will generate the desired revenue for the retail.
The team delivers many data science solutions, which are deployed at various customer touch points every quarter. āThe models create significant revenue and customer experience impact, alongside providing real-time, near-real-time, and offline solutions with varying latency requirements,ā explained Hrishikesh Vidyadhar Ganu, head of data science at Myntra.
There are many domains in which the company is trying to enter with the help of technology aids. It is trying to work on large scale recommendations which will help find people that they are not even looking for. That is products that they might like. The same way as Netflix recommends shows. It is a result of data collection of users and making sense of the data. This makes the user predictable. Thus, the company servers can better predict what the user is going to like in future. This feat is achieved through algorithms, deep personalisation which can identify fashion trends and can suggest more relatable products.
Myntra also is looking forward to building a trying feature that can help in identifying the perfect fit for a customer. Say, a tryout feature. Just like Lenskart does on its website, you can go and try out the glasses with a virtual try-on feature. This feature, to virtually try anything that you like, online is an absolute game-changer. This, not just adds to the overall customer experience but also eases the work of choice for consumers. Myntra can do that too, they can add a virtual try out feature for clothing items or personal beauty essentials etceteras.
Fashion focussed companies like Myntra do a lot of work on their supply chain management. They try to optimise the flow of work in a manner that is the least resistive and most efficient. With help of user data and data technology, they can also leverage their large scale problems of shipping and utilisations.
āWe also leverage computer vision extensively for cataloguing, inbound QC, garment measurements, etc.,ā said Hrishikesh Ganu who is the director of data science at Myntra.
Another important thing for fashion retail is the pricing models. If the pricing is not right, it does not matter how good the impression the product makes, consumers will be turned off.
With data that Myntra collects and makes sense of, they can let the tech work for them. They can even optimise prices for different customers and give others some coupons that can act as a discount. An optimised pricing strategy will help get more traffic to the website and more conversions of users.
In a recent interview, the Myntra data science team mentioned that they are currently hiring for data science roles. The company has vacant places across many roles in the field of data science.
Charudath K Nair
How Data Plays an Important Role in Improving Customer Experience at Myntra?
Myntra takes the data part very seriously. Data is DNA at the fashion retail. They know this thing that they will receive what they give. If they make sense of the data collected in a nice manner, they will go ahead in utilising and optimising the resources according to customer preferences. This can act as a great differentiator in many aspects.
With trial and error, Myntra has been able to make the walls of its data work strong. The engineering and data insights that they have gathered over the past is very useful in the future. They can use data science to evolve more in the future as they provide the best-personalised fashion to every customer. They will probably be one of the firsts to do something like this in the Indian fashion segment.
They continuously are involved in data scoring and structuring. Every algorithm that they decide on is AB tested with keeping real users in mind. The world of E-commerce revolves around being more and more consumer-centric. This is why companies like Myntra invest a lot of time and energy resources in this field. This enables them to get a better profit margin and a better market placement than the rest. Fashion retail has golden rules, that is, Once you get the experience right, you can get consumersā hearts.
The story of data starts when users communicate with the website. They can be ordering something, returning something or just pondering/hovering over something.
All that data is collected and makes sense, in the form of patterns. These patterns make bigger patterns that are called user behaviour. Which tells how a person is going to act in front of a situation. This results in better predictability and better recommendations. So, it can be said that data is the source and fuel for the system at the same time. It enriches the algorithm with more useful information.
How is Myntra using Growth Hacking?
At Myntra, all the technology and fashion is directed in one direction. That one direction is simply to make the user journey as smooth as possible. It should be full of aids, but not too much and it should be easy to walk on. Noticing this simple goal, they recently launched something called āGrowth hackingā.
Growth hacking is an initiative and an experiment with which Myntra is trying to capture hindrances that are faced by users. For example, users should be able to check out with a click and clicks for websites should be lowered. They are also looking to add and subtract a few traits in the post order stage.
All these little tweaks here and there will help cover the journey of the user in a smooth way. The result of which is more and improved conversion rates. Another consequence is that users have more retention and thus more revenue for the company.
These experiments like that of growth hacking Myntra is employing a method of AB testing. Since they have a large variety of products in almost every domain, it becomes imperative to make it easy for the user to make choices. The process goes like the easier the better.
In order to release the experiments at the growth hacking, they have to conduct A-B testing. It is a method by which a company tests its experiments with some people and gets their feedback. It was made sure that the experiments work well and that they donāt add any sort of hindrance to the user journey.
Pooja Uniyal
Why is Myntra Investing in Machine Learning?
From the above discussions, it is evident that Myntra is planning a lot more investments in the data department. They know that this is useful in reaching new scales of growth. They are not wrong in this manner, everyone loves personalisations and attention to detail. With data-driven growth, there are a lot of utilities that can be achieved. Myntra is betting on this new-age tech of machine learning and data science.
As they develop each wing of the data plane, like data analytics, data science and machine learning in the platform, they want to make all these things go together. In a synchronised manner, these things will work better and more efficiently.
Myntra is investing a lot in machine learning models that work in real-time. The workings of which will help Myntra to get quick and real-time feedback from users. Another reason for developing the ML platform is that they can run data from models and execute them.
Myntra is a platform that runs at a level of whole India or PAN India. This means that they have a lot of consumers to cater to. They have to be right with data if they want to predict their users’ patterns. This is one of the main reasons why Myntra is trying to improve its data science wing. It will add more depth to the organisation and will help increase the consumer experience.
Myntra has a lot of checks and balances at every step before data ingestion into the warehouse, clean-up and processing. A better capability to tackle users will make for a delightful user experience.
This is why the data science department is running to work with in-depth data details and structures of user data. This will help the whole organisation regardless of the scale at which they operate. However, it might seem easy in theory to work towards personalisation technology but it’s not easy.
There has to be a whole infrastructure setup that can be built for analytics. Myntra has also taken some steps to improve the data handling at the company. Here we will discuss these processes and the progress that they have made.
First of all, Myntra starts the work even before data arrives at its shores. They try to track every piece of information that arrives at its doorstep. It can be any data or information from warehouses, process reports and stock placements. At every step, new data is laid out and Myntra keeps full track of these. Recording everything helps the company to catch any deviations that might have occurred in the process.
Now, to improve the metrics, it has to follow a repeated process. An iterated process. The continuity of the process is the key in this venture which helps to improve monitoring and catching of errors and deviations. If the process of data collection is even and continuous, they will catch omissions quickly which makes it efficient. For even for a minute deviation or non-success in their data trajectory, they have a solid alert in place and a testing framework to report.
Conclusion
Fashion is a powerful word. With enough potential to generate a lot of cash for the trailblazer. Fashion retail has some common golden rules. That is, Once you get the customer experience right, you can get to the consumerās hearts. Once they get this thing right, they will be the market leader in fashion retail in India. This is all about brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Myntra is planning to go deeper into this segment which will allow them to better understand the market and its consumers. In the modern world, the apocalyptic 21st century, the internet and technology are the lead workers in almost every industry.
Fashion is the new world where tech is working and it has a lot of benefits. Myntra is also trying out and working on virtual trials of products on each consumer. The future and present of fashion are changing and so are the priorities of people.
FAQ
How does Myntra use big data?
Myntra tracks the user behaviour, if they are going to buy something or just surfing, what are they looking for and stores it which helps them to recommend the best-personalised fashion to every customer.
How does Myntra use machine learning?
Myntra analyses its customer data, social media and its fashion portals to find out what customers are exactly looking for.
How does Myntra use data analytics?
Myntra uses data to provide personalized recommendations to its users.
