Flipkart-owned online fashion retail major Myntra has opened up a new category on its platform for wearables and has interesting plans up its sleeve for customizing the different smart products under the wearable category. It’s called the Myntra Wearables Platform. Starting with a fitness band ‘Blink Go’ that has been just launched, there are plans to add more products.
Myntra is looking at both in-house efforts as well as enlisting third-party gadget manufacturers to integrate some of its technologies and sell their products on its online store.
The Blink Go fitness band that Myntra has launched is being sold at an inaugural price of Rs 1,679 and has a colour display; it can show the heart rate, has a step counter and can measure the distance traveled, calories burnt through the activity tracker feature on the band.
The significant part of this development is that Myntra has lost no time in using the technology it bought into while acquiring the startup Witworks, which it took over a month or two back. And taking this newly acquired technology backing to its own innovation labs, it has developed this fitness band. Going ahead, Myntra wants to release products like smart shoes and earphones, which can recognize and even talk to each other. Ultimately, Myntra plans to collect the data that these devices are able to generate and hand that back to the users.
Apart from any in-house capabilities to make any of these wearable devices, Myntra will look to add third party manufacturers, particularly those in the conventional mode and who have no access to these latest technologies. They will introduce and train these manufacturers on ways to convert their products into smart products and then sell them on Myntra Wearable Platform.
The typical products that Myntra would be looking for are footwear, audio wear (read earphones), eyewear and apparels. The online retailer says they want to garner at least a fifth of the wearables sold in the country over the next 3 years.
Myntra will be using the Marvin operating system developed by Vitworks and simultaneously build products on the Android platform as well.