We plan to scale up 40x in 3 years
When a bunch of data scientists and brand retail professionals put their heads together, they come up with an innovative proprietary demand-sensing engine to resolve challenges related to fashion trend spotting, trend forecast and the business metrics of full-price sell-through. As the world moves to season-less fashion, Stylumia, at the cutting edge of technology, uses computer vision and natural language processing and advanced analytics to draw insights from trends from the lowest level of SKUs to attributes like colour/style/silhouette/fabric/fit, etc, up to the category level trends, enabling users to get glocal insights into their relevant context in a few clicks. Stylumia founder and CEO, Ganesh Subramanian, in conversation with Paulami Chatterjee.
How much of overproduction and wastage reduction, increase in sales etc have companies using your solutions been able to achieve so far? Could you share some examples?
The key impact of using Stylumia for brands and retailers is in the P&L variables.
1. Inventory reduction: 20-50 per cent
2. Revenue growth: 25-60 per cent
3. Profit growth: 20-50 per cent
How does trend-forecasting get better with Stylumia-be it fashion trends, sales trends, demand forecasting, inventory tracking, wastage across the supply chain, etc?
I would like to first establish a fundamental myth in spotting trends. Let me start by asking "what is trend?". Before that let me share a statistic. The world produces over 150 billion garments every year-50 billion of them are sold on discounts and 50 billion does not even sell a single piece. This is a huge supply-demand gap. This is coming out of current practices. The current practice is seeing what is available and looking the movement of that is a trend. This we call "supply-driven trend forecasting". With wastage and supply demand gap above, supply driven trend forecasting will have over 50 per cent error. This is what we do fundamentally differently by using "demand-science". Demand science is the science of decoding demand of consumers at internet scale. This is challenging particularly when demand is not a public data.
How does your software connect with the consumer, the brand or retailer, manufacturer, supplier-almost across a product's supply chain?
Stylumia does everything with "consumer" at the centre. To have a consumer-driven supply chain, everyone in the chain must keep looking at what is happening at the consumer end. That is what we do by collecting data at internet scale from luxury to value across geographies and demand sense them. What this means is, we provide winning trends-not just trends. Apart from providing outside-in consumer driven fashion trends, we also help them take key decisions of "how much to produce", "where and when to distribute", which are quantitative predictions using the brand's omnichannel data. Fundamentally we solve three key questions for anyone in the fashion and lifestyle value chain:
- what to spot/design?
- how to produce/buy?
- where and when to distribute?
This is a holistic systemic view of the value chain.
The impact of this is significant for anyone in the supply chain.
- Manufacturer, supplier: Double the adoption rate and revenue with brands and retailers.
- Brand, retailer: Helps them stay relevant, trend-right and consumer-right, impacting inventory turns, revenue and profit between 20-50 per cent favourably.
- Consumer: Gets to see what is relevant, less confusion in choice and reduce wastage in the fashion and lifestyle business.
How many retailers and brands are you tied up with at the moment?
We work with over 100 brands and retailers, including Fortune 100 retailers to medium-sized brands. Our clients are in India, United States, Europe, Japan, and Hong Kong. We recently ventured into Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) market. We have our own teams operating in North America and United Kingdom. They cut across offline, online, omnichannel, and categories including clothing, accessories, jewellery, home improvement, and sports. What we do is category agnostic, but we stay focused for now in these spaces.
Which are your major markets? Where do you see the adoption of your software solutions growing?
We see India, North America, Europe, United Kingdom and ANZ as key markets and are planning to expand to other markets in the coming period. We are always looking at scaling across the world. Geography is not a limiting factor in the adoption of our solutions as we solve some fundamental challenges.
How and where does Stylumia fit in a pandemic-hit world? How good has this phase been for you considering that the world has leapfrogged into usage of technology like never before?
In a pandemic hit world, consumption pattern changes rapidly. What you need in these times is a dynamic demanddriven forecast, not the traditional snapshot expert-driven or supplydriven forecast. The traditional ways of forecasting are deadly and wasteful. Digital intelligence is more relevant when considering millions shopping online. What we do is exactly consumer-driven trends and more relevant than ever before. During the pandemic, we have seen 2-3x growth in our business due to demand uncertainties and need to stay relevant. This is across geographies- India, United States, Europe and APAC.
How does the entire system work - digging of data and then using it for trend forecasting / demand planning?
We have the capability to collect structured, semi-structured and unstructured data at internet scale. We then use our proprietary demand sensing engine to demand rank every single product multiple times in a week and gather trend lines. This is across geographies and categories. Using the demand ranked data, we use computer vision and natural language processing and advanced analytics to draw insights of trends from the lowest level of SKUs to attributes like colour/style/silhouette/fabric/fit etc up to the category level trends. The technology enables the users to get global and local insight into their relevant context in few clicks.
What is the kind of support and handholding you provide to your customers?
No software solution, irrespective of what technology it is built on, adds value unless there is adoption. We have a customer success team whose focus is to onboard the brands and retailers to our solutions and continuously ensure they can solve their real-world questions using our solutions. We provide information on adoption to our clients and work on making them successful in every possible way.
Consumer behaviour has changed amidst the pandemic. How is Stylumia trying to mitigate this with the help of its solutions?
As we are a dynamic platform with real-time trends, we capture the shifts in consumer-demand over time. This is all the more critical in this dynamic demand-uncertainty situation. The world of fashion is moving from seasonal to season-less fashion. One needs dynamic demand-sensing to execute that.
What are the biggest bottlenecks of the existing solutions of fashion forecasting and demand planning? How are your solutions different from them and their advantages?
The fundamental disconnect of existing systems from consumers are:
- Fashion forecasting: They are intuitive, supply driven even if it is data-driven which has over 50 per cent error rate.
- Demand planning: The current systems do not spot true demand. True demand is the real consumer demand which is not reflected in the sales data fully. Also using just a brand's data for planning is local optimisation for the market. What is needed is outside-in plus inside-out demand planning system with the ability to spot true-demand and white-spaces dynamically. That is what we do using the demand sensing engine and a unique tastemodel based prediction to discover truedemand. In addition, our prediction models use both images and text as fashion cannot be articulated in text.
Fashion forecasting for a big brand like Adidas to fashion forecasting for small businesses or start-ups. What are the key differentiating factors in each and how well equipped are you in that?
The key differentiating factor for any brand irrespective of size is their context. Context includes the nature of market, competition, and space they operate. Stylumia provides customisation for the relevant context of the brand-big or small. In other words, we are democratising consumer intelligence and demand planning for brands and retailers irrespective of size.
What could be the future applications of your solutions? Which other industries are you toying with?
We recently moved into home and home improvement.
The name Stylumia itself suggests "throwing light on style". Style is not just limited to what we wear and where we stay. It is in everything that we do today. Why not automobile in the future? Scope is limitless for us. We recently launched an innovation called "Stylumia ImaGenie". This is a design assistant which works on advanced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate winning designs. We see the possibility of designers using this as their input to get more ideas and winning propositions.
As a company, how do you plan to grow going forward?
We have huge possibilities of growth vertically through solutions and horizontally through geographies. While we are growing fast, we have not even touched a percentage of the possibility.
Exciting times lie ahead. We want to impact on a global scale. We would not make a significant impact on economic and environmental sustainability otherwise.
What is the story behind the formation of the brand Stylumia? Who are the key people involved? What is/are their backgrounds like?
Having been in the trenches of fashion, lifestyle brand retail for many years, we have seen the pain points. We also created the world's first AI-enabled fashion brand which is a global case study in our previous stint. We are a bunch of data scientists and brand retail professionals, solving the challenge we faced. We have two founding members, apart from me - Sharath Puranik who heads technology and data science, there is Hemamalini Padmanabhan who heads business development (India & EU & APAC), and customer success. We added two senior leaders to lead our international expansion - Sanjay Mehra, ex CEO of Ajio and ex Nike digital transformation leader heads our North America business, and Gautam Kotamraju, ex CCO, Myntra and ex Pvt Brand Head - Amazon, India leads our UK business.
What is the seed money you started with and what is the market value of the brand today? When did you break even? If not, target by when? If yes, what has been your growth story since?
We are bootstrapped and scaling. We have a plan to scale 30-40x in 2-3 years.
What is your team strength today? What kind of diverse talent do you look for and how easy or difficult is it to find the right fit?
We are a 25-member team and growing. We get huge inbound requests across fresh talent and laterals across the world. For a recent job posting, we got over 3,000 applicants. We are able to attract good talent as we are at the cutting edge of technology globally. People leave MNCs and join Stylumia. Our selection process ensures we choose only 5 per cent of the applicants we qualify. People is the key focus area for us in accomplishing our global mission.
