High fashion made affordable

Maneraa, founded in August 2019 and established by September 2020 is a new-age multi-brand ecommerce platform that seeks to provide affordable and curate fashion choices to both large and small budgets.

Maneraa has its headquarters in Mumbai and Kochi. The team seeks to onboard over 500 unique sellers by 2021 to cater to 2 million+ buyers across India. With its commitment towards sustainable growth and its inclusion of all its employees and sellers in its goal to create happiness, Maneraa is all set to become one of the top affordable fashion brands in India in the years to come.

Shabna was a dentist and her sister Shaiba, a commerce graduate quit their profession when they got an opportunity to be a part of an online aggregator for Indian ethnic fashion based in Dubai.

Shabna shares, "Our motive is very simple: to provide an equal-opportunity platform that bridges the gap between aspiration and access for both buyers and sellers, by showcasing curated and affordable Fashion and Lifestyle from unique brands to our consumers. We focus on microeconomics for a profitable & sustainable growth of the platform and its sellers making it beneficial for partners and investors."

They recognised the vast potential for affordable fashion in India as most of the population has Internet access and is fashion-conscious rather than being brand-conscious. They also recognised the potential for small, unbranded fashion retailers to share their unique products with an India-wide market on an online aggregator platform. Accordingly, Maneraa was born - an equal-opportunity platform that bridges the gap between aspiration and access for both buyers and sellers.

"While working with that firm, we came across a lot of smaller brands and retailers in India without much market exposure in spite of the big ecommerce hype in India, they were limited reach, because of their limited access and the difficulty to go online.

That's when we thought why not create a platform in India for these smaller brands and budding designers and give them an opportunity to display their unique collections and compete side by side with the bigger brands. Then the challenge started. To establish something of this sort in India where ecommerce is already on a high race, technology was vital," adds Shabna.

According to Shabna, the larger chunk of the 100 Billion dollar Indian fashion retail space are the unorganized retailers, smaller brands and designers and the unbranded retailers, constitute to about 70%, who either have no online presence or get lost among the bigger names in the big platforms.

They realized, there was an untapped opportunity in helping these smaller

retailers scale up and compete with bigger players on the ecommerce space.

They wanted to give an opportunity, access and visibility to the smaller players in the market by filling the delta between aspiration and access.

She shares, "Customer acquisition and building our customer trust were the initial challenges that we faced. When it comes to majority of the Indian buyers, the trust level goes way down while purchasing items online, especially from the newer and the lesser-known e-commerce names.

When we got active, it was the late lockdown and we saw zero movement as we deal with non-essentials goods. But post lockdown has been good for us as we have seen a surge in our sales, customer acquisition & retention. TheCOVID-19 has pushed the consumers to embrace e-commerce and now online shopping is becoming the norm everywhere."

Maneraa positions itself as a 'creator of happiness'. Through its provision of value fashion products, it seeks to contribute to the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index for India. The Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) industry is a dominant one in India and Maneraa also seeks to improve India's GDP by offering new impetus to unbranded sellers.

Each retailer is provided with an e-commerce shop front and an inventory or order management software through which they can process and track orders. Once their accounts are set up, small retailers with high-quality fashion products but no market exposure can now compete side by side with major brands for the customer's attention.

Fashion is no longer the domain of the urban elite - young men and women in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are increasingly developing a taste for looking good without spending too much. E-commerce is the ideal way to reach these buyers, and platforms like Maneraa allow them to shop from hitherto unknown brands at affordable prices whenever they wish.

Fashion Industry Post- Pandemic

Like all other sectors, the fashion industry has also been terribly hit by the pandemic, but is now on a recovery stage. With the fashion industry becoming more eco-friendly and sustainable, we will see a preference towards brands that are responsible and homegrown.

Pandemic has changed the buying pattern of customers, now the demand for casual wear and work from home styles are more as compared to formal and occasion wear. Consumer preference towards more pocket friendly fashion. Customers are now open to experiment with new affordable brands.