Myntra’s investment in machine learning is helping it discover what products it should be selling and what price points will attract customers.
The effect of the Covid-19 has pushed businesses around industries to change things previously considered impossible.
As almost any company, Myntra also had to shift all their employees to work from home overnight just days before one of their biggest annual sales events.
“From a vibrant office to working from home, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly we adapted to working from home. With the deployment of Azure, we were able to deliver one of our most successful End of Reason Sale remotely,” Amar Nagaram, CEO, Myntra said.
With its strategy to invest in technology and digital capabilities, Myntra is now focused on innovation, pace and agility to further improve its leadership role.
The organization has moved their workforce to a digital ecosystem supported by collaboration tools and remote working technologies.
Data disrupting the fashion industry:
They initially realized the need to invest in a cloud-backed data platform that can serve multiple functions, including supply chain, inventory management, website functionality, and more.
Myntra ‘s technology department explored various technologies and later chose Microsoft Azure to help their company needs. E-commerce giant has switched to Azure and other Microsoft suite solutions. The business leverages built-in Machine Learning tools to accelerate the development of advanced analytical capabilities to better understand customers. This technology investment provided Myntra with the elasticity to respond to the demand spikes of Covid-19.
ML finds its application in the fashion industry to understand customer demand through software. This allows retailers to reach the right customers and to sell prices and goods accordingly.
“The amount of data from which we learn today is six to seven times more than the pre-COVID world. Azure backed data platform has enabled us to scale-up overnight and ML capabilities gave us the right kind of levers to expedite our learnings,” Nagaram added.
Investing in technology is the new trend:
The company’s engineering and product management teams are quickly developing, implementing and testing new capabilities post this deployment. By building and centralizing its Azure data platform, Myntra is applying. advanced analytics and ML to gain a comprehensive understanding of customers and deliver personalisation to their products.The organization uses Microsoft Power BI to empower its employees to visualize and respond to feedback in real time to improve customer service and drive the business.
Right from the early days of the lockdown, Myntra was able to gain insight into market trends, customer tastes, and other attributes of consumer behaviour towards the brand. Their data-driven intelligence has helped them to prioritize their offerings accordingly.
Through data analysis and tools, the company was able to understand customer purchase patterns during this pandemic. On the basis of customer searches, purchase history, and other forms of information, Myntra introduced a range of digital initiatives, such as ‘home editing function,’ to its app.This feature focuses on categories that were among the consumer trends, such as home wear, etc. This functionality improved customer experience in their technology support app.
“The use of technology to generate actionable insights is a big reason for the success of our recent End of Reason Sale. We’re now selling what consumers want and not what we want to sell. The credit also goes to the brands that responded to these insights in a matter of days and not weeks,” Nagaram highlighted.
Myntra disrupts the age-old traditions of the fashion industry with data and machine learning. It is now capable of delivering customer insights to brands that cover variables such as location, weather patterns and more.
Recreating online shopping with data insights:
Apart from the core platforms that are being leveraged for supply chain and inventory management, the organization has also embraced a digital approach to providing unique product line-ups. Myntra Studio is a content-rich digital platform that offers new trends coming from industry influencers and fashion experts.
Amid Covid-19, observations from customer behavior at Myntra Studio indicated a spike in engagement with certain categories like DIY makeup, among others. These insights allowed the partner brands of Myntra to transfer their inventory from their physical stores, which had been shut down due to the lockdown, to the company.
While this pandemic blurred the boundaries between online and offline retail, the economy is moving towards digital integration, but also with significant importance for offline retail.
“We have witnessed offline retail embracing technology at a large scale in the last three months. Some of the brands that used our omni-channel technology during the End of Reason were able to sell inventories out of their stores that they could not sell due to the lockdown.” Nagaram said.
The company is trying to learn about consumers at an individual level. From personalised customer preferences in app to getting operational efficiency, Myntra is pioneering with new technology innovations. According to Nagaram, having the right cloud and AI technology support from Microsoft has enabled the company to spur growth.
