While marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart have been bastions for economic opportunity for fashion brands with their ever-expanding distribution and logistics capabilities, they have also contributed to the commodification of apparel. There are roughly 11,000 fashion brands selling over 2 million SKUs on Amazon India alone.

Picture this: a shopper scrolling through endless options of shirts. It is likely that she doesn’t know what type of shirt suits her body-type, what kind of fabric is better than the other, whether the product is from a brand or a manufacturer, or whether the size will fit her… However, she finds a shirt that looks nice, is at a price-point that works, and has good reviews and ratings. It arrives next day, but she quickly realizes that the fabric is itchy, the shirt is too short and the packaging has used enough plastic to fill a landfill. She returns it the following day. If this process sounds familiar to you, then you should know that you are not alone, and that there is a solution.

Enter Bombay Shirt Company. You land on the website and are prompted to fill out a style quiz that captures your individual taste. These data points are triangulated with your shopping behaviour and you are presented with a personalized feed. You can then opt in for assistance by a personal shopper, equipped with your style data, to help you curate a full look, even if that means selecting the jeans from Korra (in-house bottom-wear brand) and the shirt from BSC. Every product offered on the website can be customized to your liking – design, colour, fit – you name it, they can do it. You check-out, and receive your perfectly personalized clothes at home (in sustainable packaging no less).

While the customer journey presented above is a work-in-progress for the team, what is clear is that success will continue to derive from investing in curation and personalization. These are the weapons in a D2C brand’s arsenal that can put up a strong defence against the marketplace monoliths.

For BSC, curation and personalization seep into every aspect of their business – from curating the best fabric suppliers, automated manufacturing, and collaborating with carefully selected partners, artists or influencers to choosing potential new brands to build or buy – each decision is carefully evaluated through the lens of authenticity: does it reflect the values of the brand and the shoppers? Can they provide a truly personalized shopping experience, from product to check-out?

In fashion, like in food, one brand cannot service all the needs of any single customer. Fashion comprises of several subsegments, such as, streetwear, swimwear, innerwear, etc., where each market is large in and of itself. For any platform to service the myriad of customer needs, a house of brands approach will be required. Although the phrase “house of brands” has only recently become a “buzzword,” this is a time-tested model – think about all the brands that an LVMH or an Aditya Birla Fashions houses. BSC has realised that despite the quickly changing trends every season, this is one reality that won’t change – brands need to offer unique expertise vis-à-vis the category they are serving. As a result, the company has expanded the brands under their umbrella and, over the last year, they have acquired Korra, a denim brand, and created CityOf_, a streetwear brand.

A house of brands allows BSC to reach a larger audience and achieve quicker scale, while keeping operating costs largely the same. By effectively utilizing not only their technology and supply chain processes but also their marketing, branding and product teams across a breadth of brands, the company is able to optimize costs across their portfolio. BSC will continue to expand its umbrella of brands in the coming years and work to align all of them with BSC’s original premise: providing curated, personalized, made-to-order apparel. BSC believes that the products they make should reflect their customers’ individuality – their shoppers are one of a kind, so their clothes should be too.

To deliver on this promise, BSC has invested deeply into a data-driven ERP system that enables their supply-chain and manufacturing capabilities to deliver “personalization at scale.” These processes have allowed the company to offer clothes that can be customized to the nth degree, that lasts longer, and is better for the environment. BSC operates on a made-to-order model which ensures no-inventory, just-in-time ordering of raw materials, and reduces fabric wastage and water consumption in the manufacturing process. It is the only company in India that has scaled a custom production process with minimal inventory and no wastage. In fact, BSC’s no-inventory model also allows them to iterate quickly with designs and trends in all categories of clothing – styles can go from the runway to showroom in days with no inventory costs. This allows the team to sustainably and consistently experiment with design, potentially resulting in higher probabilities of conversion as design capabilities ramp up.

Over time, personalization and curation will become sustainable moats for the business. This focus has already pushed the company to realize that a single brand can no longer serve the market as a whole, and that by providing multiple brands to serve segmented demand, they are able to create a better personalized service for new audiences. Each brand that BSC operates is curated by the team and built to offer a custom shopping experience that is difficult to replicate without heavy investments in technology, product, manufacturing and customer experience. In fact, the more brands and categories added to the portfolio, the more defensible the company is against changing consumer trends. This combined with a personalized shopping experience curated by tastemakers at BSC positions them well to fight against the forces of fashion commodification, and to defend individuality.