ABOF

Indian Online Fashion retailer, that we all know by now, ABOF and IBM have recently announced their partnership. They together plan on delivering personalised shopping experience for customers to search for products using natural language.

If I were to write an example here, this new feature that ABOF has developed in technical collaboration with IBM, lets you post very natural questions like “I am planning on buying a yellow sun kissed shirt, can you find it?” or “My wedding is next month, show me wedding gowns?” or “my boyfriend likes red and its our date night tomorrow, can you find a good dress for me?” or “I want to look another 4 inch tall, can you find heels for me under Rs.3000” or “Show me T-shirts of black color under Rs.1000” - and you’ll have your answer. Cool, right? Now you can talk to ABOF’s fashion advisor as if it were your own friend who knows you really well and who is totally willing to help you find your dress.

Fashion keeps changing every year. Fashion portals come up with more and more features. Be it group buying or 3D viewing or on spot alteration. Such is this move from ABOF too. And they plan on implementing more watson-enabled features to increase the cognitive ability of their product. I wonder if one day ABOF would be able to suggest when and what I need to buy too even before I think of it. Spooky cool, though, if it can do that! But whether it does remains to be seen.

Anyways this partnership lets customers post questions and the system analyses it and comes with suggestion that are top matches based on their natural language processing.

Indian Fashion Industry is growing exponentially. Online sales are increasing day by day. But to retain customers, these companies need to drive deeper understanding, better engagement and leverage data more efficiently to enhance the customers’ shopping experiences. In this case at least since the customers can right away find the products they like based on their fashion advisors suggestions they wouldn’t bounce as often and the rate of conversions would be higher. By tapping into the power of Watson abof.com will be able to stand out and carve a niche in the segment. Customer experience becomes more personalised, enjoyable and informed, there by giving customers a more personal touch.  

Millennials are their target segment. Millennials love Technology. Millennials love fashion. Millennials love personalisation. Millennials shop online a lot. Put all these factors together, ABOFs collaboration with IBM does seem like a great move. From now on customers will start talking to AISHA like they do with SIRI. Does sound found! How successful it is going to be is, time is to tell!

All the best ABOF!

Past:

Within 90 days of launch, abof.com has clocked a GMV of Rs.100 crores. Launched in October 2015, they hit this number by January 2016. Pretty quick for such a cluttered space. ABOF was serving 6000 pin codes in over 500 cities at the time of this. Most of the offline retailers choose to go online and ABOF did the same. In three months, 20% of the orders were coming from repeat customers and there was less than 15% return versus the industry average of 20-25%. This would mean they were doing relatively very well.

The company never really gave out the number of orders shipped daily or revenue figures as such. But they did claim to be looking at 10-15% market share by 2020. ABOF believes in long term goals as short term ones could often lead to wrong decisions, and then it will have to pull the discount lever which would hurt even more.

ABOF has always tried to create differentiators that would make it stand out. And 3 months figures seemed quite healthy. And that they were doing it right.

Three strategies that ABOF follows are - Sharp segmentation and focused targeting at millennials, personalised content and style tips. And back then they had 55 brands translating to 10,000-12000 SKUs. About 40% of their sales where their own private label brand. They were planning on having not more than 100 brands on board.

Their service is 365 days a year which would also include sundays and holidays. Refund on pickup and on spot exchange are their features. Their tie up with logistics players GoJavaas, Delhivery and some others helps the easy delivery of items. Its backend service is so that the same delivery guy delivers and picks up the package in case of an exchange.

They also had partnered with Metail for 3D-model fitting.

Now:

ABOF sets it targets. Aiming a three fold growth. Eyes at least 15% market share by 2020!

"In the current fiscal (2017-18) we expect to grow our business by about three times from existing levels and expect a market share of about 10-15 per cent in the next three years," abof.com president and CEO Prashant Gupta told PTI.

In the last 12 months, abof’s gross merchandise value in its peak month was reported to be Rs.25 crore. Which would average to Rs.300 crore in 2016-2017. Net revenues for each month were about Rs.10 crore a month.

They are investing quite a lot of money into technology and marketing. They won’t be breaking even anytime soon. But they are getting constant orders and are not losing out on them. Last fiscal the company saw healthy order margins which helps recover the cost of servicing orders.

No matter how much the business grows, their capital requirement won’t grow.  ABOF right now should be focusing on building a brand and other stuff that would place them in the market instead of losing money on every order. This would mean the money has to be invested here instead of deep discounts.  But the space ruled by Fashion Trinity Myntra, Flipkart and Jabong (70% share) sees a lot of players that keep throwing discounts. If they are to be in the game, they should also throw discounts at least until they build a brand and loyalty of the customers so that they won’t have to throw discounts anymore.

Customers compare. Industry has gotten them used to discounts and less prices. A sad truth but still a truth. So to be seen by the customer as a viable option the brand will still have give discounts to a certain extent or they risk being called unaffordable by common customers. This is probably why their break even will take a while too. They have to make a reasonable sale after reducing discounting levels prevailing in the market today.

ABOF has about 125 brands and is right now working on bringing Forever 21 on board. ABOF has been adding and deleting brands based on customers insights. Customer centric - cool, right? Whatever happened to not having more than 100 brands, that we do not have information on yet.

Their marketing campaigns are usually on digital medium, but these days they seem to be planning to get on to mass media as well.

ABOF is an Indian online fashion retailer founded in October 2015. Headquarters are in Bangalore. ABOF is privately held by Aditya Birla Group which you probably have already heard of. ABOF not only sells products from its brands Louis Phillippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly, Peter England, Pantaloons, People but also of other external brands. This company only caters to the fashion needs of 18-35 age group. ABOF expanded means all about fashion. Cool, right?

There has been a lot happening in online retailers space, fashion space and Aditya Birla group had entered into this space by launching its fashion portal abof.com. “The e-commerce sector is a sunrise sector from an investment point of view. While a lot has happened in the last couple of years, a lot more is yet to happen in this space”, Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla said at the launch. He added, "With abof.com, we aim to offer a wide but curated range of merchandise and a differentiated shopping experience that can compete with the best in the world. We see abof emerging as the most admired player in online fashion within the next three years. Therefore, it made sense for us to enter into fashion e-commerce to further strengthen our pole position in the business of fashion in India. We see the potential to build another billion dollar business of the Group in this space."

Abof.com aims to be online one stop fashion portal for apparel, footwear and accessories for men and women. Foraying into pure-play fashion e-commerce space, the Aditya Birla Group aims to further strengthen its stronghold in the business of fashion in India.

ABOF aims to be the most admired online fashion brand of India. They are looking to provide customers with a personalised shopping experience and for this they have partnered with a UK based company that has the best technology, Metail. They have got real good and trendy and celebrity-inspired apparel, footwear and accessories that can go into every fashion lover’s wardrobe.

They are mobile first. But work seamlessly across a wide range of devices including desktops. Equipped with India’s first-of-its-kind 3D virtual trial room, customers can instantly view themselves in any product by inputting their basic body proportions. The tool allows one to layer various garments to check out looks. The webstore also uses a unique style quiz to understand customers’ preferences and shows only relevant personalised content.

They use premium packaging so when their items are being delivered they remain intact. And their delivery team works even during weekends. Their supply chain is tech enabled. They currently serve in 500 cities.

The online fashion store also launched on spot alteration service in Bangalore and Hyderabad, last year June. According to them this initiative was so it will reduce returns and drive customer satisfaction and alteration. It is supposed to be a value added service like the 3D trial room and on-spot exchange of apparel due to size issues. The firm partnered with yourtailor.com and others for it to be possible. This probably decreased returns due to non fitting issues. This move is pretty similar to that of Myntra which provides this service at Rs.50. Craftsvilla on the other hand lets customers order unstitched materials passed to tailors so they could be stitched right to the size.

During the first reached they reached a gross merchandise value of Rs.200 crores and has set its eyes on becoming the one of the top 3 Indian retailers. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

“We should be able to grow our revenue anywhere between 50-75 percent on a year-on-year basis,” the deputy chief executive officer of Abof, Kedar Apshankar told BloombergQuint in an interview. The company will steer clear of discounts and focus primarily on millennials, Apshankar added. This no discount strategy is because ABOF claims that they need customers looking for the best fashion and not discounts. They plan on selling at least half of their merchandise at full price in a market which is dominated by flipkart and amazon. He also added, “About 30% of the market is buying for convenience and 70% of the market is probably buying for discounts. A good retailer always has this number to be more like 50%, but it is a journey we have to traverse and I think over time we will get there. We have added a new feature -Never on discount -that means the customer will not wait. That was the insight when we launched SKULT by Shahid Kapoor back in October and have not put any discount on the merchandise. It has become our bestseller. So we have reached out to other brands with the new strategy.”

During Feb, 2017 ABOF has launched a AI based advisor for Fashion. A personal touch is what customers miss when they are shopping online. So many fashion portals are trying to be more and more interactive. Such is the move ABOF made by launching a Facebook Messenger which is AI powered. It acts as customer’s personal fashion advisor.

The advisor termed as AISHA (Artificial Intelligence driven Styling and Hotness Advisor) provides a chat function through which customers can get fashion advice on their fashion and wearing products requirements anytime and anywhere.

This is what Gupta wrote to its customer at the launch of AISHA

“We are the first ever e-commerce fashion player to introduce such an advisor, it doesn't even require users to have the abof app installed on their smartphones. We believe that AISHA will become very sophisticated as time progresses. We will keep adding more features to it. Globally, the world is moving towards conversational commerce and with AISHA, we aim to become the SIRI/Cortana/Echo of Fashion.”

AISHA is user friendly and understands fashion queries. You can probably ask it, you know, to suggest a look for any occasion or event. Cool, right! Try it today, go to their page and talk to the messenger.

Keep checking this page out for more news on ABOF.