India’s luxury fashion market continues to thrive

Despite an initial downturn, the luxury fashion market in India continues to thrive, opines Akram Tariq Khan, Cofounder, YourLibaas, a UAE-based ecommerce company founded in 2014 in New Delhi. Khan say, a recent spurt in users from Tier II+ cities has fueled huge growth in ecommerce across sectors. Demand for luxury fashion is higher than ever as physical retail sales are at an all-time low within the last decade, and ecommerce has witnessed phenomenal growth. There is a spurt of new consumers moving online, says Khan. He advises brands to support vernacular language, WhatsApp commerce, penetrate into a higher number of zip codes, etc.

Khan says, the industry now has augmented reality that enables virtual try-on tools - one could choose a design and see how it shall look. It has data analytics to predict user interest and demand and train the pricing and sorting algorithms to ease product discovery. It also has AI that enables personalization at an individual level, which isn’t possible in the offline world. His firm YourLibaas has embraced conversational commerce in a bid to depart from the robotic-styled way of handling consumers.