Exclusive Interview with Neha Kant, Founder and Director, Clovia Lingerie

Major disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, big data, and many more have started helping businesses to reach a wide range of target audience and expand the customer reach across the country or beyond boundaries. The whole process ranging from collecting enormous volumes of real-time data to after-sale service to customers, technologies have made it easier and seamless for all kinds of businesses across the world. Chatbots are also introduced in the tech-driven market to provide personalized assistance to each and every customer possible.

Here is an exclusive interview with Neha Kant, Founder and Director, Clovia Lingerie, who enlightened the readers about how leveraging cutting-edge technologies can help to expand a business with specialized services such as chatbots and fit tests for personalized services to customers.

Kindly brief us about the company, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Clovia is all about world-class products to Indian customers at the right price point. At Clovia, right from the initial days, always aimed to offer absolute solutions to customers— be it innerwear business or loungewear or activewear expansion, from ground-breaking shapewear solutions to maternity focused ranges— it has always been about finding and addressing prevailing gaps in customers' needs and filling them up with innovation.

Today, the company is one of India's leading direct-to-consumer innerwear, loungewear & personal care brands focused on addressing key pain points for both millennial and experienced customers. After a journey of close to a decade, the team sells one unit every two seconds on the back of a tech-driven lean supply chain and strong brand positioning. With time, Clovia has successfully extended into multiple women's lifestyle categories like activewear, shapewear, maternity, and recently, personal care products.

With improved margins and repeat business from existing customers, it has achieved profitability post-lockdown in FY20 with a double-digit EBITDA. The team has noticed a 100% ARR growth in FY'20 over FY'19 with its own online store now registering double-digit growth month on month. It grew sleep & loungewear line multifold, doubled down on innerwear in the last three quarters. It has been observed— 9X scale in sleepwear and loungewear, a 6X scale in maternity lingerie and feeding nightwear, 6X growth in athleisure, and a 2X scale in Clovia's customer partnership program as users all over the country were looking for more trusted sources such as family, friends.

Tell us how your company is contributing to IoT/AI/big data analytics and how the company is benefiting the clients. 

Clovia is a 100% data-driven brand. It has successfully built a rich user profiling model where over 150 mn data points across 2.8 mn users are processed every night. This data contributes to rendering a 360-degree efficiency to improve a product, demand projections, supply-chain, distribution, as well as post-purchase customer services.

By using data analytics the company has been able to closely monitor every possible query and consumer buying behaviour. The team has gathered interesting insights which have helped the business grow at a rapid pace. To highlight a few examples— over 2 mn women have shared their intimate data on body type and wardrobe preferences with the company and that helps designers and fit developers iterate on products continuously. Today,a new product failure rate is abysmal and the team can launch new products with a very high degree of confidence.
Another example of effective use of data is how algorithm decides which courier partner to carry which parcel. There are over 20K pin codes and different pricing slabs and real-time service levels also fluctuate. Deciding which franchise/local office services the best services v/s the best rates and picking the best option has helped in giving good delivery service while keeping the costs down. Further, ensuring it has back-to-back integrations to keep information in real-time on where the parcel has reached, keeping the customer informed at all times. Alerts are also generated to notify of any drops/failures.

What have been the most significant challenges that you have faced at the forefront of analytics?

While handling data or using technology, it is very important to consider the 'human' factor. Clovia may build excellent models but the end-user (designers, sales teams, etc.) should be able to find it easy to use them. For example, the company has collected over a million feedbacks on products but to the designers, all that data gets consolidated into one datapoint called— feedback score. So, they can check only one feedback score for a product or the type of pad, elastic, etc., and then make decisions accordingly. For any product showing sluggish behaviour, the system identifies the problem (quality issue/pricing/visual representation/design) on its own and flags the relevant team— quality or marketing or content.

Tell us about the chatbot services by the company? How do you foresee its benefits in the long run?

Early this year, Clovialaunched, the Bra-Bot— an online AI-based chatbot curated to help one buy the right inner-wear and other categories. This is a part of Clovia's continued effort to bring its online shopping experience closer to an assisted offline Clovia store experience and provide its customers technology-driven help for making the right purchase decisions in the product category which boasts of high customer engagement.

Clovia's customer engagement on social platforms has been extremely strong through the years. The Bra-bot, as it's internally called by the team, is capable of understanding the customer's needs, and guide her/ him to the correct product while advising on the sizing using Clovia's proprietary tool,CloviaCurve ™ fittest. This leads to a frictionless purchase experience while ensuring the customer is not blocked by surges in call traffic or site footfalls.

The bot can handle varied issues from helping to make a purchase to updating one on their order & delivery status or pointing one to policies, FAQs, or sizing suggestions. The response to the Bra-Bot has been exceptional so far. The bot is currently handling over 35% of customer queries automatically and the rest is being seamlessly passed to a support executive. There has been a strong inclination of customers towards preferring WhatsApp for interaction over connecting via call, often seen as a trend among millennials these days.

An interesting insight to note is Clovia has seen a great inclination of customers from tier ⅔ towns over tier 1 when it comes to the adoption of the tool.

Soon, the team is planning to come up with updates where the bra-bot will be seen speaking or suggesting to individual customers based on their past purchase and browsing patterns leading to a much more targeted experience at an individual level.

What are the tools and technologies used in the frontend and backend?

Neha Kant launched Clovia with a core vision of solving the problem and providing every Indian woman with lingerie of her right size. Considering the length & breadth of the country, with changing seasons, the body types and choices differ almost every 100 miles. To address the vast customer base across India, the only way that could help was through advanced tech adaptation.

Here are a few tools and technologies that the team has incorporated at the frontend and backend:

Clovia curve fit test: The proprietary fit test has helped almost 600k women so far to understand the right size for them.  It is a quick algorithm that asks five common or visual questions to understand customers' comfortability fit and accordingly recommend the best fit and size to the customer. With immense user data on each of the products (over 500K feedback processed monthly), bra to user match is getting massive responses.

The team has other user-friendly tools such as dress to bra match, Bra Bro that lets men decide the right gift for their better halves, as well as a period tracker and fertility tracker that helps a user connect with Clovia on all things intimate and personal.

The company has double-digit conversion rates from the users of these tools on recommended items.

Personalization: Every click is now being accounted for to understand the consumption patterns. With a fit test givinga detailed understanding of customer's body types, the team is able to recommend their best fits, creating almost a sales assistant experience. It collects over 2 mn data points here daily.

At the backend, the team has effective tools to optimize inventory, tracking of trial to purchase ratio, sales feedback gathering, and maintaining a unique size per style ratio.

What is the roadmap for the company for the year 2021?

While Clovia is progressively continuing to foray into new product lines, it is also encountering a host of organic or inorganic opportunities to grow internationally, which are going to be explored in the coming quarters. The team is also planning to see Clovia's presence in at least two more international geographies. Meanwhile, there is a plan to triplethe offline store count in the coming year.