Anurag Rajpal, Director and CEO, The American Swan Lifestyle Company

“The challenges that we encountered in the last fiscal quarter were that consumer off-take was a little weak because of marketing sentiment, sales were primarily led by promotions and mark-downs, and e-commerce players, especially aggregators skewed the business owing to the need to increase volumes and expand businesses. Individual brands like ours had to match these players with equally attractive offers and promos. However, being a new entrant in a competitive market American Swan has achieved a fair success in its first year of operations. We sold ~2,00,000+ units with approx. Rs 40 crore+ (MRP value). Our average inventory sell-through was 75 percent. These are very encouraging numbers and we are confident that our focus on product, fulfillment and marketing have struck the right chord with our audience. For this fiscal, there are a few key areas that we as a brand are focussing on for the coming year: New geographies & territories both in India as well as International. We will also be adding new categories in our product offering to strengthen the line for the youth-led segment which is our primary target audience. We will continue to strengthen our presence in the digital & social ecosystem offers a mix of content, technology, convenience and innovation: all of which combine to engage the audience in a very potent way.  Today, every brand realises the need to reach out to their target audience through the online, digital and social channels. It is a medium that allows you to target, measure and optimise your campaign and communication. We believe these will be our growth drivers to achieve both scale and salience. We are working towards mobile and social apps and initiatives that allow us to tap into the fast-growing segment of consumers who are actively transacting through mobile & hand-held devices. We are targeting MRP sales of Rs 100 crore in the coming year.”