Call it the effect of reorganization or change of hands of ownership to Walmart, Myntra, the leader of online fashion in India has been losing heavily in its sales volumes. The revenue for the financial year ended March 2018 declined to a mere Rs 427 crore, an 80% drop from the previous year.
You may recall that after the takeover of Flipkart, which owns Myntra, by the US retail giant Walmart, large-scale changes were effected with the importance of Myntra being down-scaled from an independently operating unit under the erstwhile Flipkart management. It’s CEO, Ananth Narayanan was asked to report to the Flipkart CEO and several back-end operations were merged with that of Flipkart Fashion. It was a clear signal that the new dispensation was happier promoting the inhouse Flipkart Fashion rather than having an independent fashion, in fact two of them, Myntra and Jabong. Ananth Narayanan and a host of senior executives in Myntra resigned and moved on.
But strangely, Myntra’s spokesperson refuses to see anything amiss in the financial figures revealed and says the management is focused on growing the Myntra and Jabong brands.
What is at stake is the ambitious programme chalked out by the team of Binny Bansal, a co-founder of Flipkart and Ananth Narayanan to take the Myntra brand and a host of private labels they had promoted over the years. Binny Bansal was running the Myntra outfit with the CEO reporting to him and not to the Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy.
The immediate plan the company has is hit the US and Canada markets through Walmart’s stores, selling a fashion brand All About You which has the backing of Bollywood beau Deepika Pudukone
There are some 14 private labels developed by Myntra. Some important ones include Roadster, Dressberry, Anouk, Hrithik Roshan’s HRX and two more; House of Pataudi in association with Saif Ali Khan, the son of Nawab of Pataudi and Sztori, an exclusive plus-size range have also been launched.
The private labels Roadster and HRX are planned to be taken offline with 100 retail outlets to be opened across the country.
Observers and customers alike would be keenly watching the developments at the online fashion house as things unfold in the coming weeks and months on what happens to all these plans.
There is the government’s ecommerce policy waiting to be unveiled soon and how it affects business at Flipkart and Myntra will also be watched with interest.
There are also reports that the B2B arm, Flipkart India has been losing as much as 700% more now than it was under the management of the Bansals.