Online lifestyle brand MensXP has launched a curated lifestyle shopping site, MensXP Shop, which offers exclusive men’s beauty, clothing and accessories for millennial men.
The shop, already has a 100 partner brands live on the platform and four private label brands. Angad Bhatia, founder, MensXP, talks about the growth strategy of his company’s new retail venture and its plans to launch more private label brands in the men’s category. Excerpts:
Being a media entity, what is the rationale behind launching full-fledged retail operations?
The idea was to build on the brand experience for our users and extend the experience from content to commerce. With a 40 million strong and growing customer base, we have observed a desire to purchase, which was not being fulfilled via the existing avenues. On the other hand, consumers are targeted on the basis of their media consumption habits and preferences.
Today, over 90 percent of millennial spend their leisure time on social networking platforms. This has really helped new-age brands like us and we aim to build a comprehensive experience to effectively cater to this tech-savvy user-base, where they are able to read about, watch and shop the brands they want. We have also launched ‘ILN Assembly’, a suite of 4 premium direct-to-consumer private label brands that caters to the needs of conscientious men who have been largely under-served by large conglomerates.
In which categories do you see most of the demand coming from? Your estimate about the grooming market in India?
Men’s lifestyle market in India has been picking up a lot of steam. Growing aspirations, increasing awareness and rising per capita income has spawned a growth in the image-conscious man’s need for fast fashion and specialised beauty products. Men’s fashion and beauty products such as BB cream are the fastest growing shopping categories, particularly in the age group of 26-35.
The overall concentrated fashion and grooming men’s market in India is growing at over 8 per cent CAGR and is likely to grow from Rs 2.1 lakh crore in 2018 to Rs 2.87 lakh crore in 2022, with the share of online looking to grow from 4.5 per cent to 15 per cent in the next three years given the rapid shift in trends in the online habits of men. The industry revenues is also set to touch a record Rs 35,000 crore over the next two years, up from 16,800 crore in 2018.
Your future plans going forward?
We aim to be India’s first content-commerce unicorn. We aim to garner Rs 350-400 crore in commerce over the next two years. We plan to bring another 50-60 private label brands on our platform across men’s grooming and fashion.
What are the major operational challenges in your category?
We built the business infrastructure ground up, everything from our e-commerce platform and warehousing facilities to logistics network geared to deliver a seamless and premium online shopping experience for the users. We are working towards making our private labels including MensXP Mud available at our own retail stores across the country.