This new year we are seeing a huge upside on Fastrack brand: Ajay Maurya

Fastrack was launched in 1998 and became an independent urban youth brand in 2005. Since then, it has carved a niche for itself with watches and sunglasses that are both fashionable and affordable. Fastrack extended its footprint to accessories in 2009 with a range of bags, belts and wallets. Fastrack retails across the nation through 158 exclusive Fastrack stores in over 79 cities as well as authorized multi-brand outlets and online (www.fastrack.in). Today, the brand has successfully notched up the title of being the most loved youth fashion brand in the country. The brand stays focused on its audience and delivers what they want before they even know they want it.

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Fastrack is accessible and owns the playing field. It is not cheap, just affordable. It is not just about fashion but rather, lifestyle. Since the brand is very strongly aligned with fashion, they continuously keep reinventing and keep coming up with new styles and new designs to meet the customer expectations and match the trends that are prevailing in the fashion world.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Ajay Maurya, Marketing Head, Fastrack, speaks in depth about Fastrack the brand and how they keep reinventing to match the tastes of their audiences with constant innovations.

Fashion and technology change very fast. How has Fastrack as a brand adapted to the quick changes and kept innovating new products in this category? Have you noticed any behavioural changes post the pandemic for this category?

There has been a significant increase in the dependency on technology in the last 5 years and the pandemic has only accelerated it. The heightened need to look after one’s health, fitness and immunity is one of the key behavioral changes during the on-going pandemic.

Even within the wearables segment, we have seen demand for new technological features such as SPO2 monitor, which became a household word with consumers post the pandemic.

The wearables category is continuously seeing disruption in terms of features, and the used cases with evolving consumer needs. In line with growing need of advance features in the wearables category we have introduced our first Smartwatch, Fastrack Reflex VOX, which is an attempt in scaling our presence in the wearable segment.

Among its many features, Built-in Alexa is the key feature of Fastrack Reflex VOX. Other differentiating features such as 100 + watch faces, 10 + days battery life, 1.69” HD screen. For the GenZ who are fashion conscious and fitness freaks, this is the smartwatch to look forward to. Reflex VOX also has a plethora of trackers like sleep tracker, daily activity tracker and menstrual tracker to name a few. The watch features a soft silicone band that never goes out of style and sits comfortably on the wrist to give it a fashionable look.

How have you differentiated your offerings to grow in this price sensitive and highly competitive Smart Audio and wearables category?

There are different brands and product offering at premium and economical price points for wearables and hearables category, but with the disruption in technology and continuously evolving consumer needs, we feel there is enough marketshare for all players.

FastrackReflex is sharply positioned as a ‘fash-tech’ brand, which is committed to address the social imagery of its young customers. Since 2017 with the launch of our first Reflex fitness bands the innovation and growth journey has been onwards and upwards at Fastrack.

In 2021, we ventured into the smart audio segment with Reflex Tunes, thus expanding the Reflex cluster, which has flourished for us in the last year. Our journey started with headphones and neckbands, but significant play for Reflex Tunes starts this year with the launch of FT3 and FT4, in the truly wireless Earbuds space which is blooming the fastest.

You recently collaborated with the iconic brand Coke. What was the purpose and how did you leverage this collaboration to benefit the Fastrack brand? 

Coca Cola globally stands for bringing people together, sharing, and community happiness. Coke in its approach has always been youthful and celebratory. The one thing that Indian Gen Z has truly missed in the last one year has been making connections, and with #AwesomeTogether, our objective was to celebrate this connection of contrasts enabling the youth to make undefined connections.

As Fastrack celebrates the undefined identity of Gen Z and fuels their fearless expression of selves, we wanted to bring people together in spirits and rejoice the uncanny and epic connections. The collaboration with Coca Cola for this new collection of watches was very seamless as the overall personality for the two brands are similar in nature.

What has been your distribution strategy? Are you looking at more online sales or are you wooing customers to visit your showrooms?

Our distribution is a healthy mix of on-ground and online selling. Our target customers get the seamless experience of checking out all our latest launches across channels of their choice. Our presence in on-ground channels consists of Fastrack stores (exclusive brand outlet), Titan World stores, authorised dealer outlets and large format chains like Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle, Central and Reliance Trends. Online selling is through brand website Fastrack.in and e-commerce partners like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra and Nykaa.

Who is your target audience? Could you elaborate their profile and how do you keep matching their expectations and satisfy their needs?

The Gen Z with their fluid identity, freedom of expression, and unbridled spirit is Fastrack’s core audience and to stay relevant to them the brand keeps reinventing itself. In line with this approach we also recently repositioned to “You Do You” that helped getting proximity to our customers. “You Do You” encourages them to have no stress or fear and to freely express themselves.

We try to capture the youth’s pulse with all the new products we launch. The youth has a sweet spot for fashion and technology, which is only increasing with time and thus, focus is on offering lifestyle led feature-rich products with an edge. Our understanding of the youth consumer that we cater to helps us to strengthen the new product offerings.

What is your outlook for 2022? Any new products that are being planned in the year ahead? 

This new year we are seeing a huge upside on Fastrack brand. This will be fulfilled through continuous focus on bringing the smart products for technology lovers and growour market share in the smartwatch category. Conventional watches still form a large chunk of our business. We are looking at youth fashion concertedly and we will come with new styles and new designs, and keep re-innovating to match to the trends in fashion space for the youth.