The Silicon Review ^Asia

Flipkart-owned online fashion marketplace Myntra is diversifying into home furnishing, precious and non-precious jewellery and personal care segments in an attempt to widen its consumer base and shore up profits. Myntra had restricted its presence to apparel and accessories, but will now take on focused players in the space such as Urban Ladder, PepperFry, Nykaa and Bluestone.

Ananth Narayanan, CEO at Myntra, saif “This is a big bet for us to take our first step to expansion in the lifestyle segment, which will also help us meet our set target of attaining profitability by 2017.”

The company has tied up with 40 brands for the home furnishing segment, and will enter the personal care products space and jewellery segments by July. “In all these categories, we will be looking at mass premium segment where the margins are high, so it works for unit-economics,” said Narayanan.

As per sources, Myntra was toying with the idea of selling home furnishings and precious jewellery nearly two years ago, but decided not to venture into the space as home furnishing was high on logistics costs and had low repeat orders.

According to industry analysts, home furnishing is a Rs 3,000-crore category and is growing at 70% year-on-year.

The estimated size of the domestic jewellery and bullion market in India is between $30 billion and $40 billion, respectively, and online sales of fashion and fine jewellery combined stood at $150 million in 2015.The Bengaluru-based company is hiring architects and interior designers to help consumers pick and choose products on the platform.

Experts said Myntra’s latest move could also be triggered by increasingly the competitive online fashion space which has seen the entry of two large conglomerates Reliance and Aditya Birla in the past few months.
“Since, the margins look tough in the home furnishing category, it does not make sense for a controlled marketplace to diversify into this,” said an ex-Myntra employee. Leading marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart have been entering several new categories to gain economies of scale and mop up higher sales especially in big-ticket items such as furniture and jewellery.