Exclusive | Young woman who loves experimenting: Shopnineteen's Gobind Pahwa

If you are a young woman who loves to experiment with different fashion and styles, then the place to be is not an overseas high branded fashion store nor is it a domestic fashion outlet. The place to be in is Shopnineteen.com, an online shop. Yes for young women Shopnineteen offers a vast collection of apparels, accessories & footwear to choose from, exclusively designed by a team of talented in-house designers.

Based out of New Delhi, this casual - western wear brand belonging to the Kansin Group was incepted in March 2012 and within this short span of time has already made its mark in the e-commerce space. Speaking to Adgully, Gobind Pahwa, Vice Chairman, Shopnineteen.com, mentioned about the unique approach and says, “we launch new collection every fortnight with its orders getting dispatched within 24hours.”

The overall market (online + offline), the current market size of women's wear modern retail format is approximately $ 2.6bn and growing at great speed of 18 % CAGR. The size of the online apparel market within the overall market is very small, around $ 300mn but growing at a speed of more than 40% Y-o-Y.

Says Pahwa on the growth strategy of the venture, “We plan to become the biggest online fashion brand with strong presence in global markets as well. Nineteen started because we saw a huge gap in women western wear fashion market where we just have good international brands which are not suitably priced for Indian masses and the reach is also too less.” The global and manufacturing strength of the Kansin group is behind us to support in this vision, he adds.

With the e-commerce story evolving in India, the real story may yet to be written. Most e-commerce ventures that started between last 3 years are just laying the founding pillars. The industry is at $1.5bn and is estimated to touch $8 bn just by 2016 which is like 5 times of the current business. However right now the biggest challenge, as most players agree is logistics. Even after a huge increase in e-commerce business scale, the logistics companies service levels are not increasing proportionately. That's the reason all big portals are going for their own logistics now. Another challenge is of bandwidth issue. Biggest of the telecom companies do not service with even 20% of the bandwidth they charge for. Also, off late there has been some confusion going on with the companies funded with FDIs which I am sure is a policy issue and would be resolved soon.

As for Shopnineteen, the challenges notwithstanding it have aggressive marketing approach. Says Pahwa, “we are fashion company. We don't have any other option but to deliver global level merchandise with lightening speed. We are the only fashion brand in India after Zara which launches new collections every 2 weeks.” To futher its marketing the company has also been reaching out to a lot of colleges, BPOs and other corporates as well where it finds its target audience.