Technology is one of the biggest pillars of our success

As Bestseller completes 15 years in the country, Ranjan Sharma, CIO & Supply Chain Head, Bestseller India speaks about the role of technology in helping the company adapt, evolve and innovate to successfully grow in the market

A veteran with 27 years of experience in handling various aspects of retail technology, Ranjan Sharma joined Bestseller India in 2012, after having worked with the likes of Future Group, Vishal Retail and Future.com. Over the years, the scope of his work at Bestseller grew in quantum and complexity as he helped the company meet the needs and at times stay ahead of the changing times and consumers with his expertise and experience.

An alumnus of the American International University of Management & Technology, NIIT and IIM Kozhikode, Sharma shoulders two critical aspects of Bestseller’s business in India – information technology (IT) and Supply Chain.

As the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Head of Supply Chain, Ranjan is responsible for ensuring the Danish company’s operations in India run smoothly and efficiently while enabling its more than 3000 employees with the help of the right technology.

To provide an overview, Bestseller India offers seven distinctive brands, namely Jack&Jones, Vero Moda, Only, Selected Homme, Jack&Jones Junior, Vero Moda Girl, and the recently acquired homegrown ethnicwear brand, Indifusion.

These brands are available through a diverse network of over 350 exclusive brand outlets (EBOs) and franchise stores, over 1,600 shop-in-shops, and an expansive e-commerce presence spanning various platforms, including the company’s webstore. Furthermore, two of the company’s brands are actively engaged in distribution business in India.

Considering the size of the canvas, ensuring smooth operations while ensuring innovation to stay ahead of the competition is no mean task, especially since the company is in the business of fast fashion. But Sharma handles it all with poise and panache, relying on his mantra— of keeping things simple. While he doesn’t allow himself to get bogged down by the overwhelming changes in technology or the market, he is not the one to sit back and follow.

He prefers to be at the forefront of innovation and keep doing new things, unafraid of making mistakes. If things are not working out, he has the wisdom to kill a project instead of continuing on the wrong path. This attitude has won him several accolades and the respect of his fraternity, making him a sought-after speaker at various fora.

As Bestseller completes 15 years in the country, Sharma speaks to Phyigital in an exclusive interview about the role technology has played in helping the company adapt, evolve and innovate and not just keep doing better every day but stay ahead.

Bestseller completed 15 years in India. How has the company been performing?

Bestseller India celebrates its 15th year in the country with a remarkable journey. In 2008, it began its Indian venture with the opening of the first Jack&Jones store in Mumbai’s Oberoi Mall. From these modest beginnings, it has evolved into a thriving organisation. Starting with just one store and 10 employees, Bestseller India now employs around 3,000 professionals who handle various facets of the business, from brand management to warehousing.

BESTSELLER India’s retail presence has also grown substantially, with over 350 EBOs and more than 1,600 SIS across the nation. Embracing the digital age, Bestseller India has established a robust online presence. Our e-commerce platform enables customers to conveniently access their preferred brands and products from their homes. Additionally, we have strengthened our business through a well-organized distribution network, ensuring efficient product availability across the country. The future promises more exciting developments and continued success.

What role has technology played in enabling this?

Technology has been one of the biggest pillars of success for us. If you look at how diverse we are—different brands, different businesses, different channels—with that kind of a complexity, technology is the only binding force for all. It enables us to run the businesses and scale them quickly. Technology is the enabler, the backbone to ensure that everything works the way it is expected to work and also gives us an edge in terms of solving some of the future problems.

Can you elaborate?

If technology just supports today’s operation, then it is purely operational tech. That’s not a space we are in. We are into a space where we manage the future and we are into fast fashion, which is daunting to manage because there’s so much new happening every day. How do you spot the new trends? How do you bring them into your mainstream business? How do you convert that and manage shocks like COVID-19?

How do you have a business continuity plan so that you are able to continue when no demand planning or forecasting is working for you?… That’s where tech starts playing a much larger role. Also, to enable some of the new age digital-led businesses like ecommerce, omnichannel, WhatsApp or social commerce. That’s where tech empowers.

Can you identify areas in which technology has helped Bestseller India change its game?

If you are a fast fashion retailer, product is where you make your biggest investment. That’s where we started bringing in a huge amount of technology… to solve problems which a human brain possibly can’t by churning the amount of data available and making right inferences. So, we brought in AI/ML for spotting a trend and localising it to our brand. Also, to bring in a science to able to say hey, this is what you should make, and this is the quantity you should make.

And predict whether the sell through of a product will go up or down if you change certain parameters like a colour or the fabric. Because at the end of the day, we are all in the business of having the maximum sell through for a product. The more the product sells, the better it sells and the faster it sells, the healthier our business is.

Fast fashion is all about bringing in products, selling them quickly and replacing them with new products. That’s one area where technology has played a large role for us.

And the other area?

The other area where technology has helped us is in efficiently managing our supply chain in terms of how quickly we can transform and how fast we can react to changes.

It has helped us to manage diverse businesses, each with demands of its own. Exclusive outlets have their own supply chain requirements, the shop-in-shops business has its own needs, so does e-commerce. How do you manage all of this from the same distribution centre with a single view of inventory across all channels?

How do you do the fulfilment for e-commerce?

All our stores are also micro fulfilment centres. It’s about converting the same store which used to be a point of sale and a customer experience centre into a micro fulfilment centre and enable your store employees to be able to fulfil orders which could be coming from your digital channels and thus improving product sell-through. So, there are a lot of areas where technology is playing a key role.

Are you also employing technology at the stores?

There are large transformations underway in-store as I speak. Our stores have done immensely well. But now we need to take the store experience to the next level. And that’s where we are working on. We’re bringing a new point of sale solution and some more tech to help us to improve efficiency and accuracy of the inventory, bringing speed and agility at the storefront.

We are trying to use internet of things (IoT) to understand customers walking into our store. We are bringing tech to improve our customer understanding and service. We are also leveraging QR codes to engage with customers and connect with them.

How do you use AI/ML?

We’ve been using AI/ML for almost six years to help us spot trends and identify ones that could be relevant for our customers in India and then we added a layer to help us forecast what kind of fabrics, colours work and how much we should produce. We are also using AI/ML in the space of customer insights. We are currently also running a large data-based project where again the AI/ML is going to play a big role because we are going to infuse AI/ML into our data and data platforms.

What is the intended outcome of the exercise?

The idea is to make people smarter. In fashion retail, people used to do things based on gut. That’s great because creativity is needed in fashion retail. But if you can back it up with some science, some data points, that’s where the whole game changes.

Humanly, it’s not possible for any designer, any merchandiser to be able to remember things like a product that sold in 2017 or 2018, why it sold, what was the sell through and what it looked like. Today, we are no more looking at data in columns. We have embedded images into our analytics, making it more visual. When a merchandiser, product guy or a designer looks at a report, he sees the product image which is more relatable to him rather than just some numbers.

Do you use AI/ML to improve customer experience?

We use AI/ML for personalization and making recommendations to customers. We are now improving the same to add marketing capabilities like knowing which customer to reach, which channel to use and what time.

It’s going to connect all our channels such that the same recommendation, same personalization works across channels enabling us to give a unified experience to customers wherever they go—WhatsApp, webstore or offline store.

What’s the contribution of different channels to the business?

Our business thrives through the synergy of multiple channels. E- commerce plays a pivotal role in connecting with customers across the nation, especially post-pandemic, enhancing accessibility and maintaining relevance in the dynamic retail landscape.

Our physical stores serve as the foundation, providing a tangible and immersive brand experience that fosters personal connections with customers, allowing them to interact directly with our products. Simultaneously, our distribution network is essential in ensuring
our products reach a broad customer base across the country, bridging the gap between the brand and consumers through various retail outlets.

These channels work in tandem, creating a robust and effective business strategy, where e-commerce broadens our reach, physical stores offer immersive experiences, and the distribution network ensures widespread availability. Each channel is integral to our brand’s success in the competitive retail industry.

Where are you in terms of omnichannel capabilities?

We are omni channel for more than three years now. We embarked on the journey even before the pandemic. We ship from store a large part of our e-commerce orders.

When a customer walks into a store, we don’t have a view if that customer had been to our web store or conversational commerce platforms and initiated a journey or purchased something. Those are the things that we are trying to bring together…capabilities like buy anywhere, return anywhere and buy online, pick up at store with a single view of the customer across our channels.

What are the challenges for you as a CIO when handling such large and complex operations?

The goal post is changing every day…this is one of the biggest challenges. How do you not just adapt to it but also see it coming and build for it? Because technology must always stay a step ahead of the future.

We have been growing at a high speed and on one hand we have the challenge of managing the speed of growth and on the other, of innovating.Also, finding people with the right skill sets combined with passion is a challenge.

Speaking of people, do you use technology to improve productivity?

Efficiency improvement or enablement of people is a large part of our technology investments. We were one of the firsts to have our own app for employees back in 2014. Today, we have taken it to the next level. We invested into a bot for employees way back in 2017-2018.

We also invest in several platforms. Also, we are a cloud native company, which brings in a lot of agility to do things. Another area we are investing big is in our data capabilities to ensure that people have all the data to take smarter and faster decisions and link them back to operations.

We are bringing in a huge amount of automation to help get rid of mundane work and do more value-based work. In retail people are the key and we will have to enable and empower them to do their work faster, better and with higher accuracy.

Can you elaborate on the kind of platforms you’re investing in?

We’ve invested in platform which help in planning. Then there are app engine platforms where we are investing in. We are exploring what all we can achieve with the help of automation.

When it comes to technology investments, people often have a wait and watch attitude. They allow others to make their mistakes and once it works fine for everyone, then copy it.

At Bestseller, we do not believe in that approach. We like to be at the forefront of innovation, doing new things. We as an organisation, have stayed ahead in technology because we want to be ahead in business. We don’t want to invest in technology for the sake of it but because we want to grow, build our brands and have a higher market share. That keeps us pushing for more in technology.