Reliance AJIO to create differentiated e-commerce model for India

Reliance Retail Limited (RRL), the retail arm of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries, is not only the largest retailer in India, but has also attained market leadership in most of categories it operates in. As on 31st March 2016, it operated 3,245 stores in 532 cities across core format sectors such as value, fashion and lifestyle, digital, and jewellery.
Not so long ago, Reliance had announced its plans to adopt a multi-channel retail strategy across all its formats to tap the burgeoning e-commerce market in India.  Going ahead with the plan, the company recently launched AJIO (Ajio.com), its fashion and style e-commerce platform.
It is a significant initiative from Reliance Retail that seeks to offer a differentiated Omnichannel shopping experience and deliver tremendous choice and convenience to the consumers.

AJIO.com was unveiled on April 2, 2016 at the country’s leading fashion extravaganza, Lakme Fashion Week (LFW). It is a style philosophy, a brand foremost. A style destination which offers handpicked curated fashion across a unique selection of own brand, international brands, authentic handcrafted artisanal products, inspired indie and national brands. The online store will also be offering a significant majority of exclusive merchandise that customers will not find elsewhere.
Its target audience is fashion lovers and trendsetters looking for exclusive accessible premium collection. The store wants to create a distinct positioning for itself in the cluttered online fashion space driven largely by discounts, and will make premium fashion accessible via excellent value. The company wants to build a brand with strong emotional connect, and aims to provide the very best price/value to the discerning consumers.
According to it, this is a more sustainable approach that will differentiate AJIO in the market.

AJIO’s endeavor is to redefine the fashion by challenging the stereotypes and breaking them. AJIO’s style is inimitable, it says. It’s all about “fearless  fashion” and calls out boldly on the conformism built into the society as regards fashion. For its preview showing at the LFW, AJIO made a statement with its #DoubtIsOut campaign, which appeals to the woman who is empowered, who knows what she wants to be, and is confident in being who she is.
In sync with the campaign theme, AJIO picked up unconventional showstoppers and brought in exceptional women achievers from unique genres as showstoppers who epitomise the ‘Doubt is Out’ movement.
The original Bollywood ‘item girl’ Helen walked the ramp, demonstrating ‘Age no bar’ to look stylish; the daring Sunny Leone sashayed down to say ‘Choice no bar’; the chubby and bubbly Bharti Singh, known for her stand-up comedy on reality shows, walked the ramp effortlessly to ‘Size no bar’; The first Indian woman to fly an MIG fighter jet, Suman Sharma, walked the ramp for ‘Career no bar’; wrapping it up was Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the transgender activist, stealing the show with ‘Gender no bar’.

As indicated by Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited, with the advanced internet infrastructure built by Jio and a robust physical retail business built by Reliance Retail, AJIO will create a differentiated e-commerce model for India.
The model will entail seamless integration of online and offline while innovating across superior customer experience, delivery services and payment ecosystem. AJIO will leverage Reliance’s stellar sourcing, supply chain and retail operations capabilities to differentiate further in the market.
Markedly, supply chain will be a combination of internal and external partnerships. The company is partnering with leading supply chain organizations across the country to deliver an impactful shopping experience.
In addition, it will also gain from Jio’s digital ecosystem. The platform is built leveraging best-in-class technology put together in a record time leveraging best open source and some best e-commerce off-the-shelf products.
It has considerable advantages of it being able to leverage Reliance’s state of the art JIO tech ecosystem like JIO Chat as well as Reliance Retail and JIO physical assets, thereby enabling true Omnichannel experience.
The company gave the first hint of how it plans to revolutionize the buying experience during its launch at LFW. It presented an innovative concept of ‘Shop-able Runway’ at the show.
The ‘AJIO Shop-able Runway’ offered an instant shopping option to audiences for the outfi ts showcased on the ramp. By clicking a link, users could directly reach the shopping section for the specific outfits on AJIO’s website. The show was streamed live in order to reach out to fashionistas across the country.

The company has strived to ensure that AJIO is easy to navigate, fun to shop, and delightful to experience. The store will mainly focus on designer wear and high-fashion international brands. An accessible premium in its truest sense, it will feature a collection of over 200 international and national brands as well as own-brand merchandise comprising apparels, lingerie, shoes, accessories and jewellery.
Apart from a wide assortment of known brands, a significant majority of AJIO’s merchandise is exclusive as it offers curated fashion to consumers. The store offers curated ranges from several international brands from Russia, Turkey, Singapore, Australia, etc. and authentic handcrafted artisanal products, inspired indie labels from upcoming young designers, Reliance Trends, Reliance Brands and more.
With curated offering, AJIO is well-positioned to provide for all the evolving fashion and style needs of today’s consumer including handpicked Capsule Collections and the artisan-crafted Indie picks, in addition to several national and international brands.
The store’s Indie collection presents one of the finest online collections of original works by artisans and boutiques from across India and the world, on a single platform.

AJIO serves pan India, expanding rapidly over the next few months. It will be leveraging Reliance Trends for omni-channel approach which will open up many opportunities to innovate on delivery solutions and service levels going forward.
The platform has been built keeping future scale and performance expectations of consumers in mind. With this foundational platform, strong engineering team and Reliance JIO and Retail technology ecosystem being leveraged – AJIO is looking to evolve at rapid pace and would be making consumer experience more personalised, channel agnostic and experiences that bring best of both offline and online world together.