The vibrant colours and motifs of Indian ethnic fashion have cracked the global fashion market but there are a handful of Indian names whose contemporary western fashion has barely been at a fair place globally. With brands Zara, H&M, DKNY, etc, dominating the contemporary and luxury fashion space for ages, the Indian counterparts are a bit unwelcomed to the western consumers. But, The House of Rare – a premium and luxury fashion brand seems to be an exception. The brand is the most admired fashion brand in the country and across Asia, it aims to establish its premium brands Rare Rabbit in menswear and Rareism in womenswear that will introduce the newest fashion trends in the market at competitive pricing while selling in a premium environment.
The House of Rare is a subsidiary of Radhamani Textiles Private Ltd”, one of the most valued apparel manufacturing companies of India with an annual manufacturing capacity of 2 million and 6 million annually. By 2025, the brand aims to strengthen its foothold in the global fashion market for which it wanted to build its eCommerce platform that could scale with its goals.
The House of Rare: The becoming of a global brand with Shopify
The House of Rare initially launched its exclusive collection on Koovs. The brand’s European-styled apparel with detailed designs was quick enough to attract attention that led Rare Rabbit – a premium brand for men’s fashion from the parent fashion brand to develop its fan base. Witnessing an impressive reception from customers, it nudged the brand to launch Rareism- a premium brand for women’s fashion that further encouraged them to set up their online store.
From a competing platform, the fashion brand decided to build its online store on Shopify in 2019. The reason for choosing Shopify can be attributed to its easy store setup and scalability.
The House of Rare certainly did not want to hire an experienced in-house tech team to manage the functioning of their online store site, which makes Shopify a suitable choice. The platform ensures speed, minimise or eliminates the occurrence of technical glitches, and provides easy scaling with a vast range of plug-and-play applications available for different use cases.
The brand’s e-commerce owner Pulkit Verma wanted to focus on branding for which an e-commerce platform was desired that could be set up using its easy-to-use advanced customisations. With myriad apps and integrations available on Shopify, the fashion brand wanted to improve the shopping experience for the customers without worrying about the site not functioning at any given point in time.
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The brand’s e-commerce owner Pulkit Verma wanted to focus on branding for which an e-commerce platform was desired that could be set up using its easy-to-use advanced customisations.
Easy payment at The House of Rare’s – integration with Shopify
Easy payment for the completion of purchases forms a major part of providing a seamless shopping experience for any online store. A customer with a shopping intention should never leave the cart due to the lack of their preferred payment method. But to set up multiple payment methods manually consumes time and is equally daunting. The Shopify- Razorpay integration helps a digital store to make their online payment seamless. The platform’s one-click integration with Razorpay helped the brand accept payments through the Razorpay Payment Gateway. It enabled the site to accept payments via debit card, credit card, net banking, UPI, and other supported digital wallets. The Shopify plugin offers seamless integration allowing their customers to pay on the store without being redirected to another page. To strengthen their foothold in international markets The House of Rare required a smart payment solution that can accept international orders. With Razorpay’s integration, the site witnessed an increase in international conversions.
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The ratio return to origin indicates the returning of products to the warehouse without reaching the customer.
Minimising the return to origin (RTO) ratio
As more conversions began happening, several incidents of fraud orders took place. The House of Rare being a premium brand in the fashionwear space, tracking and identifying orders that have a high return to origin vulnerability became an essential task. The ratio return to origin indicates the returning of products to the warehouse without reaching the customer and wastage of resources that involved packaging to forward and return logistics costs including the blocked inventory costs. The brand had an RTO ratio of 30 percent on the orders. To minimise the ratio, verification of addresses is required which is a cumbersome process if done manually and can hinder any brand’s growth. The House of Rare needed a solution that would seamlessly work with their payment gateway. Since their site was already integrated with Razorpay for enabling online payment, they were introduced to its AI-powered RTO & fraud detection solution, Thirdwatch, which was installed to the Shopify store with a single click. Thirdwatch is an e-commerce solution by Razorpay which is tailored to suit the Indian market and has helped many e-commerce businesses to successfully reduce their RTO and increase the number of successful order deliveries.
With the Thirdwatch installation with the Shopify store, its AI-powered engine captured more than 300 parameters from the store data. The data captured was then processed to understand which orders were risky and had a high RTO ratio. The solution marked the low-risk ones green and the red ones high. With this solution installed in their Shopify store, the brand’s women wear range i.e. RareRabbit achieved the following :
- Identified orders with high RTO risk to enable timely cancellation.
- Detect incomplete or fake addresses.
- Flagged incorrect contact information (email ID/mobile number)
- Updated the address before order shipping by speaking and confirming orders with customers.
- Detected and cancelled fraudulent orders before shipping.
- Predict impulse purchase patterns with high RTO rates
Using the Thirdwatch application, business owners can also send automated messages via WhatsApp and SMS to the buyers of the red-flagged orders. This adds a layer of confirmation before you approve the orders for shipping. The application’s ability to indicate high-risk orders from the customer data, the Shopify-Thirdwatch integration enabled the fashion brand to implement customer recovery and loyalty strategies like offering direct discounts to shoppers through payment links to incentivise them for upfront payment.
As The House of Rare readies itself to scale its online store to conquer the territories of global markets, the quick plug-and-play integrations offered by Shopify ensure a robust infrastructure and retain the authenticity for the brand to grow on.
