Guerrilla marketing has proven extremely resourceful for Clovia: Neha Kant

Launched in 2012, House of Clovia is a Noida-headquartered premier D2C fashion, lingerie and personal care company that designs, manufactures and sells premium fashion lingerie, innerwear, nightwear, shapewear, swimwear and athleisure products under the brand Clovia; and personal care products under the brand Skivia. Last year, Reliance Retail Ventures acquired 89% stake in the brand Clovia.

In conversation with Adgully, Neha Kant, Founder and CRO, Clovia, reveals how the fashion, lingerie and personal care brand differentiates itself from the competition, the marketing strategies that aim to make lingerie a critical part of a woman’s wardrobe, introduction of ‘Clovia Curve Fit Test’ tool, use of BOTs, and more.

How does Clovia differentiate itself from other lingerie and sleepwear brands in the market?

Clovia has been built on three important pillars: In-house designing and production leading to strict control on quality + smart technology + improvising customer feedback.

Clovia designs in-house, hand-picks raw material and manufactures its own products, managing the entire product life cycle, to what we internally call mind-to-wardrobe. We have an in-house designing team that helps us innovate products high on style and comfort. We import fabrics, laces and satins from different parts of the world, but everything is manufactured in India. Clovia’s USP is the variety of styles that we offer our customers. We launch 250+ styles per month and more than 75% of our inventory is less than 30 days old. Clovia aims to redefine the Indian lingerie market, and help customers choose beyond standard cuts, shapes and colours. Our mantra is – lingerie is a critical part of your wardrobe and it doesn’t need to be drab and boring.

In addition, Clovia is based on an amalgamation of fashion and technology. We have patent-pending algorithms that help us gauge the customer purchase pattern through our sales channels and track their feedback fast. It helps us know which product, design, colour are being purchased more and also more importantly, which products have high satisfaction score. This helps us provide better products and also plan our inventory accordingly. We also use smart technology and big data analytics for smart management of our inventory ensuring we have the industry best inventory holding, one of the most critical parameters for scaling an apparel business.

Being a responsible business, Clovia is aware of the sensitivity and privacy issues related to buying lingerie buying for lingerie. To guarantee that the same discreet billing and packaging are used for client privacy during the purchase, shipping, and returns processes.

What are some of the key challenges and opportunities you see in the lingerie industry today?

Stale inventory and efficient management of omnichannel are the major challenges in the innerwear industry.

Another major challenge is changing the mindset of “one size fits all”. In India, we need an India specific size chart synchronizing with Indian body type. To tackle the issue of ill fitting, Clovia has come up with breakthrough technology and has created a tool called the “Clovia Curve Fit Test”. Through extensive research, the brand developed its proprietary tool that asks a woman 5 questions about her body type and then recommends the right sizing. This helped us to reach a high customer satisfaction score here and the tool has been used/ attempted over 500K times.

Could you share some insights into Clovia’s product development process and how you ensure quality and comfort for your customers?

Clovia has built its processes such that we gather a huge amount of feedback on each of our products as well as we listen to customers closely. We have over 1 million product feedbacks and 140 million other data points gathered through these processes that have helped us become very attuned to customer’s needs, preferences and understand the emerging trends faster than our peers. Based on our research and finding, our team creates concepts and designs for new lingerie and sleepwear products. Extensive testing and quality checks are conducted to ensure that all materials meet the required standards.

Talking about the quality and comfort for our customers, we conduct rigorous testing on our products to evaluate their performance, durability, and comfort. We also encourage regular customer feedback and reviews to continuously improve our products. Through customer feedback, sales data, and market trends we identify areas for enhancement and develop new iterations of our products.

What marketing and branding strategies does Clovia employ to reach and engage its target audience?

At Clovia, 75% of the user base is women in the age group of 18-35 years. Hence, the content posted on the brand page needs to be extremely relatable, relevant and engaging. Light-hearted, witty as well as educational content is helping the brand get better reach and more followers. This brand positioning helps us establish an emotional connect with the audience. The meme content and doodle gets highly appreciated, liked and shared with their network of friends, family members and colleagues. Keeping the audience engaged through memes, topical content, moment marketing. What we love about the campaign strategy is how closely we monitor the trends and how quickly we hop on to the latest trends, upcoming movies or series.

Guerrilla marketing has proven extremely resourceful for Clovia. We have collaborated with famous contestants of popular reality shows as ‘Bigg Boss’ and have have celebs such as Nimrit Kaur Ahluwalia, Archana Gautam, Priyanka Chaudhary, Sumbhul Touqueer Khan, Soundarya Sharma post pictures and reels of themselves wearing Clovia Nightwear in the Bigg Boss House and similarly in many other mainstream shows. Through our extensive social media marketing, Clovia’s owl print nightwear was one of the most popular and most sold products, as it was spotted on ‘Bigg Boss’ celebrities on the show.

Last year, Clovia launched its first-ever 360 degree campaign led by the launch of its first national TVC. The brand signed up Bollywood actress Shraddha Kapoor as its first ever brand ambassador. The campaign was themed around ‘Happy is my Superpower’, which was an integrated marketing campaign over digital, cinema and social media, apart from TV.

Every single day, the urban Indian woman has to make difficult choices – constantly juggling between societal expectations and living life on her own terms. The objective of the campaign through the film subtly challenged societal perceptions and conventions, which bind women. The TVC is a celebration of women doing what makes them happy while celebrating their unbeatable spirit.

To amplify the anthem and also the campaign, Clovia partnered with influencers, which helped the brand to achieve their campaign objectives in several ways.

The brand is also actively involved in content marketing, running live sessions, weekly contests and giveaways, sales and offers amplifications on important contextual days, engaging stories and cross promotion/ partnerships with other core brands.

How does Clovia leverage technology and innovation to enhance the customer experience?

Clovia also introduced Clovia Curve Fit Test, the first of its kind in India, a patent-pending algorithm that recommends the right size and more importantly, the right fit for each body type. Built over inputs from nearly half a million Indian women, it has been successful in recommending the right bra to women across 900+ cities in India. Users buying using this tool have significantly higher repeat purchase rates.

Recently, Clovia launched Whatsapp as a service provider for customers to trigger purchase, offer and service updates on Whatsapp. The ‘BRABOT’ understands customer requirements from their messages and identifies sales or service processes. The BOT engaged 200,000 customers in the first 30 days of the launch. The BOT also drives the sales process by understanding what customers are looking for and making product suggestions.

What are the future plans and growth strategies for Clovia in terms of expansion into new markets or product categories?

As the product-market fit has been a roaring success for Clovia and the feedback and customer response/ retention is epic, the focus now is primarily to meet demand and ensure growth on all channels of distribution.

Clovia is currently expanding both in the online and offline space with equal vigor and 60%+ of its customers come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets with high repeat purchase trend. The fun for a brand is to understand the audience and nuances of each channel and ensure a genuine omni experience for customers and sellers. This is Clovia’s main focus for the next 5-6 quarters. In the coming years, Clovia plans to grow extensively and focusing on category growth, and product innovation.

Clovia also plans to expand in General Trade aggressively this year targeting 5,000 doors overall.

What role does data analytics play in shaping Clovia’s business decisions and strategies?

Clovia is a 100% data driven brand and is an amalgamation of fashion and technology. The brand has built a proprietary technology engine known as ReX (or ReqS, that is, short for Requirement Simulator). The brand has patent-pending algorithms that help gauge the customer purchase pattern through the sales channels and track their feedback fast. It helps the brand to know which product, design, colour are being purchased more and also more importantly, which products have high satisfaction scores. This helps to provide better products and also plan the inventory accordingly, without saving any personal data. We also use smart technology and big data analytics for smart management of our inventory ensuring we have the industry best inventory holding, one of the most critical parameters for scaling an apparel business.

How does Clovia ensure a seamless and efficient shopping experience for its customers across different channels (online and offline)?

With online, Clovia has patent-pending algorithms that help them gauge customer purchase patterns, and track post-purchase/ usage feedback. Clovia has also launched WhatsApp as a service provider for customers to trigger purchases, offers and service updates on WhatsApp. BOT understands customer needs from their messages and identifies sales or service processes. BOT added 200,000 customers in the first 30 days of launch. Today, Clovia’s offerings are based on its feedback-led design approach that processes over 1 million product feedback and 140 million other customer-profile data points to iterate on its fits and design collection; and backed by its proprietary “Clovia Curve Fit Test”. More than 700,000 women have trusted the brand with their intimate fit data through Clovia’s patent pending Curve Fit Test, which helps to improve the brand’s sizing metrics and achieve the lowest rate of returns in the industry.

In addition to that, Clovia has other user-friendly tools such as:

• Dress to bra match;
• Bra Bro - helping men decide the right gift for their better halves
• Period tracker, Fertility tracker which helps a user connect with Clovia on all things intimate and personal.
• We have a double-digit conversion rate from the users of these tools on recommended items.

Coming to offline stores, Clovia has in-store representatives, who would ensure that staff is well-trained and knowledgeable about the products. Staff members would be able to provide personalised assistance, fit consultations, and answer any customer queries, creating a positive and helpful shopping experience for the customers.