Offline retail businesses at the very onset of the pandemic, began to face innumerable difficulties owing to the strict curbs imposed by the government. The one way retailers are leveraging, is to grow through the online medium, seeing the market size of it. According to a report, e-commerce is growing fast with the global sales expected to reach $6.4 trillion by 2024, the explosive growth in the sector is due to pandemic.
Meanwhile, in the face of these challenges many retailers are turning it into opportunities.Through this the brands can reach new potential customers and reach the business beyond geographic locations, which was not possible in the case of brick and mortar stores.
To know more about this, we spoke to Prashanth Sathri, Madsto Clothing Private Limited.
Established in 2017, Madsto Clothing Pvt Ltd. has made a name for itself in the list of top suppliers of men’s round neck T-shirts in India. The company is located in Bengaluru, Karnataka and is one of the leading sellers of listed products and now the company has started to sell their products in online marketplaces.
Moving from ‘offline’ to ‘online’
Traditional brands are foraying into the digital world, keeping in mind the change in customer behaviour, but they are facing many challenges with this new model. When asked about this, Sathri told us “We have been an online brand only since last one year, before that we were completely offline. So, before entering into the online space, we have researched the market presence of similar brands, similar with respect to our product offerings. We researched every aspect of the other brands as in the product that design, colour, fit, and most importantly the cost that they were arriving at. So, what we found out was that the cost that we were able to crack, given that our manufacturing costs were much lower than the cost that these considerably bigger brands – we knew we had a sweet spot to arrive at. And that’s when we realized we have the cost advantage.”
D2C model is becoming an opportunity for the brands as they can reach customers from anywhere in the country. He added to this, “We are in the executing phase of making an entry into the D2C space challenge and we’re foreseeing the resources with the right skill sets because we all know once we are into the digital space, the data will start flowing from all the sources and to process the data, we need to analyze it and then get some meaningful decisions out of it and then take those visions into our growth story and for that we certainly request a specific skill set. I would say, resources would be the basic fundamental challenge going forward.”
Building Digital avenues
Digital transformation can be a difficult task as compared to the traditional marketing approaches. The new-age brands are interacting with the customers on a daily basis using social media and catering to the customers’ demand, and also catering to the personalization. When asked about how Madsto is focussing on building digital channels for the brand, Sathri informed us “ In my opinion, we are basically looking out for the people who are flexible enough that can meet our requirements. And of course, within our budgets and also simultaneously we are looking out for the use of certain tools that are available in the market which can process and collect key insights in the real time.”
In the D2C world, brand awareness plays a major role which can eventually increase the sales, Sathri added “We are very carefully laying out our plan by focusing firstly on the brand awareness, which would the initial set of marketing funds that will be allocated to towards the awareness which will be done through through creating ads specifically for the awareness purpose, and focussing on major channels like Facebook and Instagram for creating these ads and spreading the awareness. We want to build the social trust and then lead in the latest stage which will include focusing on those sales and conversion part of it.”
In the end he added, “So the point is we would be learning, trying, failing and again learning and again trying and so on and so forth.But, we will continue on our journey and proliferate within the D2C space with more action.”
