In a previous article, we learned about the detailed marketing strategy of greaves cotton. We saw the marketing mix, its marketing strategy, and marketing campaigns. In this blog, we will elaborate on the marketing strategy of Flyrobe, which is India’s first and largest fashion rental service store chain.
The objective of this blog is to guide you through insights into how Flyrobe became India’s largest fashion rental service store. In today’s era companies acquire customers – through digital marketing. As users across the world go digital, marketing has followed them into the digital realm as well.
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The marketing strategy of Flyrobe will be fully covered in this blog. But before we begin with the marketing strategy of Flyrobe, let us start by learning the company’s story, STP, marketing campaign, social media marketing, etc.
About Flyrobe
Flyrobe is like a wardrobe for you. It allows you to purchase designer clothes on rent for any occasion of your choice. This startup was founded by three IIT Bombay colleagues: Shreya Mishra, Pranay Surana (Co-founder and COO), and Tushar Saxena (Co-founder and CTO) in 2015. Tushar Saxena had expertise in the IT domain, and hence, he developed an app that was launched in September 2015, followed by the launch of the website in October 2015.
As mentioned earlier, Flyrobe was incorporated in 2015. But after that, it went through a Series B fundraising round on September 7, 2018, where it raised $3.71 million from Sequoia Capital.
It was discovered by them that consumers pay heavily for branded apparel, which they are going to use only once or at most twice. Hence, they came up with the idea of Flyrobe – your on-demand wardrobe. As of December 2021, the customer base of Flyrobe had reached 1 million.
Have you observed one thing in common between both companies? The founder and current CEO of the company are both females. This shows the empowerment of ‘women entrepreneurship in India.’ It also shows that it was originally launched to dress women in India and make them more beautiful.
| CEO | Aanchal Saini |
|---|---|
| CMO | N/A |
| Area Served | Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Jaipur, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, and Chandigarh, and 30+ cities. It has offline stores in New Delhi and Bangalore. |
| Industry | Apparel & Fashion |
| Market Share/ Revenue | It was acquired by Rent It Bae at a valuation of Rs. 60 crores as part cash and part stock. |
| Vision | To dress the masses who cannot afford a high-end collection of dresses for them to look like celebrities. |
| Tagline | Your on-demand wardrobe. |
Marketing Strategy of Flyrobe
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STP – Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
Segmentation:
- Flyrobe offers various types of apparel on rent, like western wear and ethnic wear. It also offers various accessories like bags, watches, jewellery, and sunglasses for rent.
- It has huge and different collections of wearables and accessories for women, men, and kids.
- This business follows a B2B and B2C model.
- The price range of the products offered by the company varies from low to mid-priced to premium, depending on the budget of the consumer.
Targeting:
- Flyrobe targets those populations who are at the early stage of their career and desire to wear formal wear and those who attend semi-formal and informal events but don’t have the budget to purchase new & expensive clothes for every occasion.
- Normally, the age group ranges from 17-26 years old and 20-40 years old.
Positioning:
- Flyrobe is well-positioned in the market to cater to the demand of customers as it offers unique services to its customers.
- Designer clothing.
- It helps to develop a personal style for both men and women.
- It offers branded western wear, which is not readily available to the masses.
- A large collection of different sizes and styles.
- It meets the emotional needs of targeted customers.
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Marketing Campaign
One of the marketing campaigns that you will find on their website is “Refer and Earn”. It says that if we refer someone, they will get 25% off on their first order, and in return, we will also get 25% off if we purchase anything from their website.
They have even mentioned some testimonials on their websites where you get an answer to the question, ‘Why Choose Rent It Bae’ has been given.
They are even the wardrobe partners for the Pavitra Rishta series, a famous and the most loved series in every Indian house.
One of the marketing campaigns on Youtube on Dec 26, 2016:
Thereafter, the campaign was about promoting their business on a wide range by using social media. The campaign was indeed successful; there are over 30,000 views on the youtube channel. Here is the video of their video marketing on YouTube: Rent It, Bae! We love to dress you! The reason behind the triumph was the unique campaign idea and the great use of video marketing strategies like proper optimization of videos to get views and creating & promoting user-generated content.
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Another Marketing Campaign in 2018.
Flyrobe has organised a wedding show from August 29th, 2018 to September 2nd, 2018.
The campaign was indeed successful, there were over 1000+ exclusive wedding styles curated for brides, grooms and their clans from 100+ designers. Everyone got to see the stellar decor from Virat & Anushka’s wedding designer.
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Social Media Marketing
Flyrobe can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. You can even contact them on WhatsApp (+91 959 959 5513). Given below is the table showing the number of followers on each of their social media handles.
| Social Media Platform | No. of followers/ subscribers |
|---|---|
|
45,260 followers 45,233 Likes |
|
| 12.5k followers | |
| 462 followers | |
| 36 followers | |
| YouTube | 117 subscribers. |
Flyrobe’s social media marketing strategy is very poor, as we can see from the follower and subscriber counts. They are mostly active on Instagram, where they have 12.5k followers. If you see their Facebook, you will hardly find their posts above 3 likes.
A screenshot of Flyrobe’s Facebook & Instagram posts:
Key Observations:
With the colour combination, i.e., red and pink, used on their Instagram handle, one can see that the brand is trying to target women. The images of products shown on their Instagram page are related to wedding outfits. But again, this is not organic, i.e., though they have 12.5k followers, they hardly have likes and comments on their posts. They are using inorganic ways to increase their reach. This shows how poor the social media marketing of the brand is.
On YouTube, you will find 12 videos, and the rest are YouTube shorts. They have uploaded BTS of the scenes from their photoshoots, a type of boomerang, on their YouTube channel. You won’t find it interesting.
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SEO Strategies
From the above image, we can see that the number of organic keywords for the website Flyrobe has is 9,629. That means that the SEO strategy of the company is decent, i.e., it is neither bad nor good. The company has to work more on its SEO strategy to increase its organic keywords and traffic.
If we see the traffic trend on the website, the traffic was higher in December 2021 and January 2022, i.e., over 1,70,000, which is normally a marriage season. But on average, it is 1,10,000. Hence, we can conclude that Flyrobe’s tariff is mostly driven only during marriage occasions. It also has 4,358 backlinks. The more backlinks it has, the more traffic it can get.
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Influencer Marketing
An influencer can be a person who has many followers on Instagram, a celebrity, or the head of the company itself. Some of them in the past, i.e., in 2019, were Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Gwalani, and Daisy Shah.
Some other celebs whose photos are uploaded on their website are Kareena Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, and Sonam Kapoor. We are not aware of whether they are still in the contract with the Bollywood industry or not. One interesting thing to note here is that you will find the face of the CEO, Aanchal Saini, herself.
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E-Commerce Strategies
According to a report published by Future Market, global online clothing rental sales are expected to grow by 11% CAGR over the next 10 years, i.e., by 2031. Flyrobe plans to meet these growth expectations by offering its products through its website.
The website is well designed and looks attractive. You will find two categories in each of the options seen in the menu. They are “Rent by Category” and “Rent by Brand.”
Flyrobe is always betting on technological integration. Almost 80% of the customers who walk into its stores first discover it online. Flyrobe’s business model is that they don’t sell clothes online but provide branded traditional outfits to customers at a rate of rent that middle-class people can afford.
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Mobile Apps
Though there was an option to download an application for Android as well as Apple iOS when you clicked on the link, the application was not available on the website. Flyrobe has to make the proper mobile application to grow its business in a wide range.
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Content Marketing Strategies
The screenshot of the magazines/newspapers where Aanchal Saini was in the news:
The CEO of Flyrobe, Aanchal Saini, has given interviews in many magazines and newspapers like LiveMint, The Times of India, Indian Retailer, YKA-Youth Ki Awaaz, ANI News, ABP News, Magicpin, The Hindu, Outlook Newspaper, Entrepreneur India, Your Story, The Franchising World, and CEO Insights India.
Their blog page is not showing up, so our analysis of it is neutral.
This ends our elaborative marketing strategy of Flyrobe. Let us conclude our learning below from the marketing strategy of Flyrobe.
Conclusion
As we saw in the marketing strategy of Flyrobe, the biggest problem plaguing them is their lack of marketing efforts. The company is very interested in working on its other social media platforms. They are not updating their posts and are not even interacting on Instagram. They should focus more on the use of hashtags, the look of their posts, their engagement with the customers and the content on their websites so that they can get more reach and the people will engage with them. Very few people know about Flyrobe.
A positive thing that we should look at is that the company is operated by a woman. This company shows that even women can run an organization along with managing their families.
Marketing is an important function of any company’s existence, and in the current scenario, the field is rapidly digitizing. As per Technavio, the global online clothing rental space is expected to grow by $990 million, at a CAGR of almost 10% between the forecasted periods of 2021 and 2025.
Just like Flyrobe almost every other company is looking to improve their digital presence and hence looking for digital marketers. If you would like to learn more and develop skills, check out Online Digital Marketing Course to learn more. Or else you can attend one of our free online masterclasses held by IIDE’s CEO, Karan Shah which will give you a glimpse into the world of digital marketing.
We hope this blog on the marketing strategy of Flyrobe has given you a good insight into the marketing strategy of Flyrobe.
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