While COVID has impacted businesses drastically, it has also allowed brands to reflect, re-evaluate, and rethink strategies. It has given them the chance to dig deeper into what their customers need to get them through these new times. As more consumers turn to the digital way of life, brands have the perfect opportunity to connect with them directly and deliver a better customer experience.
Making the most out of the pandemic, FabAlley introduced Fab Fix – a data-driven product recommendation platform that curates fashion boxes suited to a customer’s individual style. This new solution housed on the brand’s website aims to give its customers a personalized shopping experience and ease their journey in an already cluttered online retail space.
Elaborating on the same, Tanvi Malik & Shivani Poddar, Co-founders, FabAlley & Indya says, “Along with providing our customers design-differentiated, chic, and affordable clothing, we at FabAlley are also committed to constantly upping their shopping experience with us. The idea behind the personalized solutions of Fab Fix was to ease our customer’s journey by making it more convenient, quicker, and delivering just what they want at bundled and discounted prices.”
Also, different consumers have different needs and preferences and one product for all does not meet all their demands. This applies to both fashion and beauty categories alike. Bridging this gap, technology driven beauty brands – SkinKraft and Bare Anatomy were launched a few years ago.
“From our experiences, we understood that each person’s skin is unique. In fact, people born into the same family have different skin characteristics, people living the same lifestyle have different skin issues and even twins have different skin behavioral patterns. A generic product mass-produced by an FMCG company cannot be the most effective approach to skin care. In fact, these products encourage trial and error skin care where one ends up damaging their skin in the long term leading to premature ageing of the skin. This led to the birth of SkinKraft – India’s leading personalised skincare brand,” says Chaitanya Nallan, Co-founder and CEO, SkinKraft.
“We knew that there was a demand to be met, and that a long process of research would go even a longer way. With the lakhs of combinations of hair profiles (factoring in internal and external determinators) that were possible, we knew people needed more than just the 10 mass made formulations circulating in the industry, only with different prices, marketing and fragrances,” adds Sifat Khurana, Co-Founder, Bare Anatomy on the same lines.
Technology Revolution
Technology plays a major role in customising the products as per customer needs. Majorly, all brands make customers fill a questionnaire to understand their needs better and deliver a product that pleases these customers.
In the skincare industry, AI has fast become a driving force thanks to its ability to showcase the versatility of products, and also help customers understand how to use new and unique products
“At SkinKraft, we use machine learning (ML) to provide more accurate product suggestions to customers keeping their specific skin and health requirements in mind. The users are asked up to 30 questions pertaining to their skin type and lifestyle choices which might have a direct or indirect implication on their skin health,” Nallan states.
“Our technology is backed by years of research done by our team of industry expert scientists, who have worked all over the globe to come up with clean beauty and customized solutions. It is a continuous process that gets optimized in our in-house lab, with rigorous on-going experimentation. This extensive research has given birth to our data driven proprietary algorithm that analyzes customer’s hair profile via our hair quiz and determines the perfect ingredients and their proportions that go into the formulation,” adds Khurana.
Faballey’s algorithm studies consumers’ preferences and affinities through a fool-proof, deceptively simple quiz and segments each user into one of three universally applicable buckets – Classic, Chic and Casual. The results provided are accurate, clutter-piercing and the imbued AI in the feature not only helps consumers save browsing time but also manages to quantify preferences and provide them with curated solutions.
Consumer – The Real King
In today’s cluttered online retail space, these personalised brands are trying to solve the problem of plenty. By putting up a few simple personality and preference-led questions to customers, the solutions makes shopping a quick and delightful experience. It enables them to skip the tedious task of browsing through innumerable pages of products.
“We present our consumers with a variety of curated fashion boxes that are suited to their personal style and wants. Each box consists of apparel and accessories, bundled together at a discounted price, and refreshed with new styles each month. With its engaging user journey and data-driven results, this process offers benefits like convenience, product choice, discounted prices, and increased personalization,” assert Tanvi Malik & Shivani Poddar.
SkinKraft, being a data-driven beauty company, understands the frustration that stems from the prevalent trial and error approach that most women engage in and with SkinKraft they can finally put an end to it.
“There is no greater service offered than customization for self-care. We don’t do mass production. Each of our bottles are made with the attentive expertise, as every customer deserves,” Khurana states.
What Can We Expect Going Ahead?
In the next 5-10 years’ consumption pattern in the fashion and beauty industry will shift significantly from mass-produced products to customized products across segments. This is because of the confluence of three significant trends: mass internet adoption enabling feedback loops and user input, AI enabled understanding of ingredient effectiveness and modern manufacturing technologies.
To match changing consumer preferences, SkinKraft is planning to introduce skincare and haircare range for men in the next few months.
“Bare Anatomy plans to redefine the flawed industry and make sure that nobody is settling when it comes to the intimacies and long term implications of self care, making clean and effective beauty the new basic standard. We plan to be synonyms to conscious and customized beauty and cherish the long list of unique hair and skin profiles that take us there. One day, we will have a store in every city, take a live skin/ hair profile and personalize the formulation right there, making the inefficiencies of the beauty industry a topic of the past,” concludes Khurana.
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