Homegrown beauty and personal care brands grew 3x last year on our platform: Flipkart

Beauty and personal care (BPC) and the FMCG category overall are amongst the fastest-growing for e-commerce giant Flipkart in India, the firm said, adding that in that space, homegrown brands are making a mark.

“If you look at the growth of homegrown brands on the platform they’ve grown 3x in the last year itself. BPC is an emerging space for Flipkart. India currently stands at 10 per cent penetration of these categories whereas the US and China sit at 50 per cent and 60 per cent penetration in these categories, respectively. There’s huge upside for us to cover,” Kanchan Mishra, senior director, consumables (FMCG), Home and General Merchandise at Flipkart, told Business Today.

BPC is a category where Flipkart sees a lot of first-time users coming in. “These categories also play a huge role in increasing the transaction of customer on these platforms. It’s very important for Flipkart overall as a business since it brings very sticky cohorts of customers like women. We’re also seeing 1.5x growth from tier-2 plus customers coming into BPC,” she adds.

Mishra says Flipkart is also using immersive technology to bring in more customers. “We’re launching the skin analyser tech which will provide an immersive experience of letting customers take their selfies and let AI analyse their skin problems and throw up recommendations. We also have Virtual try on and newer ways of shopping are also catching up like live commerce and content commerce,” she adds.

Flipkart also launched Flipverse, a web 3.0-based version of Metaverse. “Customers from more than 1,500 cities spent more than 20,000 hours in the Flipverse, which is like a virtual mall. Immersive technology can get us a long way. Image search also works very well for us,” she said.

The platform, which has more than 500 brands in the BPC category, says 60 per cent of its customers come in from tier-2 plus cities. “In India, e-commerce industry has 180–190 million shoppers, around 50 million were acquired during the pandemic and more than 60 per cent of these came from tier 2 plus. Penetration opportunity is huge there since the access gap here is the most. They don’t have brands access offline. We see them as being a very strong growth driver,” she said.

One of the trends she sees in the BPC space is that customers are going for organic ingredients, clean beauty, etc. “We have seen a 2x jump to fill these white spaces. 25-35 years age group is more conscious about sustainability, clean beauty products. More than 40 brands partnered with us in this regard and over 60 per cent of our customers were willing to pay a premium for these products,” she said.

She adds that that the bigger opportunity is building e-commerce and beauty penetration in India. “An average Indian uses 4 products and average Japanese uses 22 products. Choices are evolving because e-commerce has crunched the cost of distribution and marketing of newer products. That’s the journey and opportunity we have in front of us,” she said.