Overview

Upriver started working with Nykaa to launch NYKD, a premium innerwear brand for women, on platforms other than Nykaa and make the private label a standalone brand on its own. The IPO’ed entity wanted a clear strategy to scale the brand on other marketplaces with an aim to become profitable in a given time period.

Initial Situation

  • Nykaa lacked in-house expertise on other significant fashion oriented marketplaces. Upriver was tasked to steer the brand end-to-end from launch to execution.
  • Reach break even level within 12 months of launch across marketplaces
  • Need for consulting to power the entire ecosystem for Nykd including warehousing SLA’s, Amazon policies approval, setting up reconciliation process with the finance team.

Upriver Strategy

SKU selection

Upriver team discussed with the brand team to prioritise which styles to expose first on the marketplace as time was of essence and everyone wanted to see traction to have confidence.

  • Competitor brands were studied on what style are working on Amazon and list competing NYKD sku’s on priority
  • Data from Nykaa and Nykaa fashion was studied on which style performs better in terms of sales and conversion. Lot of data was normalised to reduce noise of ads push and other strategic levels available to in-house brands on Nykaa and Nykaa Fashion.
  • Priority given to sku’s which are in everyday use as data suggested that everyday use category tends to work better on Amazon rather than fashion led sku.

Listing

Our focus was to set up the account for long term growth through best listing quality to rank high on Amazon SEO. We knew we were in competition with established brands with more than 10,000 reviews on top products. As we are not a discount brand and cannot fight on pricing, the only way to win from competition was through better SEO.

  • Shared a detailed SOP of information required to do a premium listing including hygiene factors.
  • Sessions with their design team were conducted to help them understand the requirements on Amazon for listing photos, product videos, brand videos. A+, brand story and Brand page.
  • Detailed analysis of competitors listing was done to understand customer feedback on their products.
  • Automated Request-a-Review (RAR) tool was set up on the account to increase reviews percentage per successful order.
    Key problem areas and the customer referenced keywords were picked and strategically built into the title and description for improved SEO performance.

AI advertising tool

Since the lingerie category on Amazon is more search led we knew robust advertising strategy would be a key lever that would help us enable the brands objective of growth and profits. We onboarded Nykd on US based AI advertising software Perpetua for Amazon.

  • Perpetua took care of all statistical data crunching and then taking decision using its machine learning algorithm.
  • Upriver Team could then focus on taking all strategic decisions like experimentation, going aggressive / reducing spends on sku’s, include / exclude categories in advertising.
  • Using Perpetua we leveraged its dynamic bidding feature for continuous bid adjustment on keyword level for better ROI achievement.
  • Perpetua keeps scraping data from Amazon buyer portal to better understand placements in real time.
  • Since multiple sku’s were competing on the same generic keyword, perpetua could stop sku’s bidding against each other. Using Perpetua we ensured that only 1 bid was submitted for 1 keyword at a time and then optimised based on conversion.

Consulting

From time to time strategic inputs were given to the client on various fronts like when to open new FBA locations, GST advice, getting account manager from Amazon for escalating tickets and other support, negotiating with Amazon and Flipkart for referral fee discounts, gating the brand for brand protection, getting placements at various key assets etc.

Custom dashboarding

Upriver onboarded the client on its custom dashboarding portal and detailed MIS available on a click in a simple to navigate dashboard. This was specially to keep the senior management in loop with the progress on Amazon.in

Results

Among Top 3 brands in the lingerie category within 9 months of launch

Within 9 months of working with Upriver, the brand now commands 32% market share in its category within branded players. Seeing the success of this brand, Upriver now manages multiple private labels of Nykaa on Amazon.

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