How fashion start-ups are transforming into big businesses

After food-tech, education-tech and logistic-tech companies, investors have shifted their interest towards fashion-technology start-ups and Indian entrepreneurs are using tricks learned from social media to create fashion communities that together discover, share and, most importantly, buy.
While the fashion e-commerce space is already crowded, there are a few unique start-ups that are opening up the exclusive world of fashion. The growth of such platforms can be attributed to the rise of the average ticket size – from Rs 500 to Rs 2 lakh.
From social and talent networking platforms to community building, a lot of fashion-tech companies have created a niche for themselves and have grown exponentially. This has manifested itself through the development of a good digital product as well as service platform.
Extensive use of new technology, engagement of communities and the growing connection between fashion and local or Tier II markets can be the factors among many others.
The depth of this digital transformation of fashion has been acknowledged by leaders of many companies.
“The fashion industry has always been open to adopting emerging technology for operational efficiency and customer engagement. In the last decade, there has been lot of advancement in the production techniques and also the retail store operations,” COO of fashion-tech platform 6Degree Amit Bhardwaj told IANS in an e-mail interview.
“These have helped fashion designers and companies to save cost and increase profitability,” he said.
According to Bhardwaj, “Using the power of mobile apps to reach customer where they want the brand to be and using software to plan production, marketing and services saves time, effort and resources.”
He also said that technologies like live streaming, social media, artificial intelligence based trend prediction, enterprise mobile applications are bringing the next wave of growth to the industry by real time customer engagement, leading to more sales and customer satisfaction.
Another fashion start-up, CoutLoot, is described by its owners as “an end to end fashion re-commerce service where you can buy and sell second hand or pre-loved fashion really quick and easy”.
The co-founder, Jasmeet Thind, believes that the growing consumer base makes demands for more choices.
“Handling and fulfilling large volumes becomes inefficient if not done with correct decisions which should always be based on data,” Thind told IANS.
“Fashion has not only gone hi-tech on the consumer interface of things but also at the back-end which helps in day to day decision making for the consumer and brands,” she said.
“While the consumer gets to see what he/she really likes, brands also spend much lower on getting their define traditional games on board,” Thind explained.