The Nykaa of eCommerce: How we helped them grow

All about Nykaa – the trailblazer in beauty and wellness

Nykaa is a leading online beauty retailer – with over 400 brands and an impressive range of 40,000 products. The eTailer offers a comprehensive selection of makeup, skincare, hair care, fragrances, bath and body, luxury and wellness products for women and men.

This is how we collaborated with them to scale up their operations.

The bottlenecks

The business first laid down its roots in 2012. In the beginning, manual systems could be used to manage orders.

With growing popularity, their organization found it difficult to handle increasing volumes of orders and inventory via their existing systems. Their challenges were –

• Existing processes could not manage its rising sales. This resulted in lower efficiencies and delayed shipments.
• Nykaa was positioned as a cost-effective cosmetics online retailer. So pricing was very important for them. With manual processes in place – managing pricing for different items was a daunting task.
• The inventory information was maintained in silos. This often meant that there was no common inventory pool information available – leading to miscommunication and high turnaround times.

What they needed at this time was a solution that could help them manage their operations, making them more efficient and streamlined.

How we helped

We worked with Nykaa to help them transform their business. Here’s how –

• We improved their core processes by arranging inventory batches as per product expiry dates. They have a cosmetics business – old products were often a concern among their predominantly female clientele.
• Our implementation of solutions like OMS and WMS meant that they could save on costs and resources that would get used in order management.
• Their order processing had several hiccups – one of which was mismanagement while assigning orders to warehouses. Our solution helped them manage orders between multiple warehouses – which removed many redundancies in their systems.
• By integrating their orders with handheld devices, we improved their process efficiencies.
• To help them maintain and build their performance – our solution helped them create reports to track vendor ratings and measure productivity.

We continue to support Nykaa in their journey towards eCommerce superstardom as they go from milestone to milestone.

What lies ahead?

 Recently, many online retailers are looking to expand their businesses– by bringing to the customer the ease and tangible experience of offline stores, where they get to touch and feel the product before purchase.

Not one to be left behind, Nykaa harbors plans to grow its presence offline – a strategy it kicked off when it launched its first offline store in Delhi in 2014.

The eTailer just raised close to Rs 60 crore ($ 9.5 million)and plans to use the money from the latest funding to drive its strategy of reaching customers across formats, including through online and regular stores.

The day is not far when shoppers can visit the Nykaa website and quickly tap into real-time inventory data, and see which local stores have those items in stock. They can also reserve their shopping bag online to make the same day pickup from their nearby store.

Continued in our next post: The online to Offline transformation of eTailers.

We help eTailers achieve their offline expansion plans by leveraging technologies like RTV, OMS, and WMS.

Read the complete story of how we helped Nykaa here.

 Any tips or questions for us? Leave them in the comments below.