Wedding industry lacks a brand 🥺
D2C brands struggle for ₹100 Cr club🙇🏻♂️
Here’s Manyavar’s ₹1,000 Cr story ⬇
Quick context 🗓
The Indian wedding industry is currently estimated at ₹3.8 lakh crores (growing 20–25% YoY). Wedding apparels contribute to ₹1.35 lakh crores (growing 17% YoY). Interestingly most of it is unorganised.
The Manyavar story ✨
During early 2000s ethnic wear was largely overlooked by the big players and wasn’t even viewed as ‘fashion’. In fact, it wasn’t even considered a category. Manyavar became the ethnic fashion.
Insights to ₹1,000 Cr annual sales ⬇
Lessons for D2C founders.
1/ Product positioning 🏆
Most apparel brand want to stay away from seasonal audience – like wedding apparels. Manyavar saw this an opportunity to find it’s own whitespace. It associated itself with “aspirational weddings”. It’s marketing pitch consistently nails positioning.
2/ Understanding what not to solve 🤯
In the early days, the brand handled everything from manufacturing to retail and had ₹25–30 Cr annual revenues. Later, they adopted the FOFO model to open offline stores at scale, without getting into full stack operations. This helped scale distribution with a small corporate team.
3/ Solving for strong brand recall 🔁
The wedding purchase cycle is super short (except the bridal collection). The brand need discovery during that short span of time. No wonder the brand focuses on pitching to customers who might not be immediate customers, creating a strong aspiration towards the brand – solving future demand.
4/ Right combination of { Online + Offline } 📱🏬
The price point restricts the kind of customer Manyavar can convert. Almost always, the discovery for such high value purchases begin online. The brand focuses on online search intent (Google search) channels and solves for search impression share. But, it doesn’t want them to convert right away. The brand understands the “touch & feel” nature of the purchase.
5/ The right price point – feels expensive 💸
Indians want to feel good after they purchase for wedding apparels, especially the bridge and groom. It’s signalling to tell relatives how expensive that lehenga is. The brand has a low entry price point and has a range of upto 75K for a lehenga.
6/ Right entry into decision maker’s life 👰🏻
Let’s admit – brides decide the theme & styling for apparels between the engaged couple. Manyavar hyper focuses on the bridal collection first → convert them first before cross selling to other’s in the family.
7/ Nailing cross-sell to the family 👨👩👧👦
It solves for identifying who the customer as bride/groom or guest right on the website home page. Enabling right cross sell for those attending a weeding.
What’s next for Manyavar? 🎯
Short answer: penetrate existing markets.
