Clovia, a premier lingerie brand backed by Ivy Cap Ventures, Zurich-based Mountain Partners AG and a clutch of private investors, has recently opened its 10th store in New Delhi.
Founder and Director, Neha Kant, says that apart from the 10 EBOs in Delhi, the brand has 2 EBOs in Gujarat and 1 in West Bengal. The average size of a Clovia store is between 275 and 400 sq. ft. “Aside from this, we are also present in 50+ shop-in-shops in these three states in India.”
“We have also introduced a new distribution model – Clovia Partnership Program. Under this program, we invite women around the country to educate other women about sizing and fits and run their enterprise by selling Clovia products from the comfort of their home. At present, we have around 3,000 members on board,” she adds.
Operating Model
The lingerie brand sells through direct sales channels including exclusive brand e-store, partner websites like Myntra, Jabong, Flipkart and Amazon among others and also through offline retail outlets.
“As a brand we want to be present at every customer touch point and offline was a natural progression for us. The intent was to make product touch-points that can be brand builders and self-sustaining at the same time. While online continues to grow profitably, offline helped us capture a completely complementary user base, while continuing to build the brand,” asserts Kant.
“Our Noida office is also the central design hub. Designs and raw materials are shipped out to exclusive third party manufacturing units which have been incubated by us and work exclusively with us. Our skillful use of technology helps us ensure the industry’s most efficient mind-to-market and extremely tight inventory management. On the online front, we’ve innovated to deliver some of the best sales conversion rates. These innovations have ensured the company is operationally profitable since inception,” she adds.
TG & Product Portfolio
The brand’s target audience includes working women between the ages of 25-35 years and young girls aged between 18 to 24 who are either in college or have just entered the workforce.
The brand designs, manufactures and sells premium fashion lingerie, innerwear, nightwear and shapewear. Tier II and III contribute to over 60 percent of Clovia’s orders.
“Clovia has redefined the lingerie market by going beyond standard fits, colours and sizes. We offer customers a wide variety of choices in ‘everyday essentials’, along with ‘fashion solutions’ keeping up with customer’s evolving wardrobes,” says Kant.
“As a brand which lives on feedback, and iterates its entire portfolio basis that, we are focused on a few major categories for now and have been slowly expanding our category focus. Clovia, started predominantly as a ‘bra & brief’ brand which extended into nightwear, shapewear and loungewear with time and demand. Within the categories, we’ve identified a lot of verticals for example: in bras, we have ranges for beginners and nursing mothers, as well as sizes till 44F. We launch 200+ new options including colours and prints per month across women’s bras, briefs, nightwear, shapewear, lounge wear, resort wear, swim wear, leisure wear and active wear categories,” she explains.
The brand, which produces all its products in India, offers 2,000+ plus styles across categories.
Supply Chain & Production Capacity
Clovia is a full stack lingerie brand that controls every part of its supply chain from mind-to-wardrobe.
“We procure raw material, design in-house, manufacture in third-party facilities working exclusively for us, ensure our own 4-level quality control and sell through a host of direct sale channels. Every product we create is first made in small quantities, monitored via state-of-the-art backend technology, which predicts future sales (based on sales patterns and customer feedback) and recommends what further quantities should be produced,” states Kant.
At the moment, the brand is manufacturing almost a million units per month and ship close to 2 million units in a quarter.
“We deliver pan India across 970 cities and to over 13,000 pin codes,” she says, adding, “Clovia has an established operating infrastructure with a 30,000 sq. ft. capacity warehouse and a wide distribution network with logistic partners pan India.”
A Technology Forward Company
Clovia uses smart technology and big data analytics for smart management of inventory ensuring that they have a highly consumer-relevant range all times with high sell-through rates resulting in industry best inventory holding.
“We have set up a unique distribution system (both online and offline) which is based on direct interaction with customers, getting their direct feedback and using the same in planning the next product range. Big data played a big role here and this led to an extremely strong connect with our customers, leading to creation of a brand on the back of experience and not pure-play marketing,” she says.
“We use smart technology and big data analytics to plan consumptions and purchase patterns. We stock the maximum number of SKUs in the industry with minimum inventory holding. Also, using technology for geographical understanding of tastes, we’re bringing structure to a traditionally unorganised market,” she further states.
Future Plans
The lingerie brand is expanding both in the online and the offline space with equal vigour. The brand is putting in the effort to understand audiences and nuances of each channel to ensure a true Omnichannel experience for customers and sellers. This is the key focus for Clovia over the next five to six quarters.
“We have been operationally profitable,” she says.
The brand currently generates around 15 percent of its revenue from offline channels and expects the revenue to witness a 50 percent growth in the current financial year.
“Clovia gets over 55 percent of its total online sales through its own website which will maintain its share. The rest comes from online marketplaces such as Amazon,” Kant concludes.
