At an exclusive bash last night, Amazon Fashion unveiled their most ambitious project in India till date: a state-of-the-art studio space in Gurgaon, only the third of its kind in the world after London and New York. Blink, which is being touted as the largest standalone fashion imaging studio in the country, is spread over 44,000 sqft and features 16 photo bays, a large editorial suite, video editing facilities and offices.
Arun Sirdeshmukh, Head, Amazon Fashion in India, explained the vision behind the company’s behemoth investment.
What is Amazon’s goal for introducing this space to India?
Our aim is to make Amazon the best place to buy fashion online and the opening of our new fashion studio, in the heart of the leading fashion capital in India, illustrates our ambitions in this area. We focus relentlessly on innovating the customer experience, and we approach our fashion business through the same lens. We’re always thinking about how we will raise the bar, how we will redefine the way the customer discovers, engages with, and shops for fashion online. Our NCR Studio is a critical investment in the kind of high-quality imagery that inspires and educates our customers.
To illustrate how this studio will help us: In fashion e-commerce, high quality imagery isn’t just ‘nice to have’, it’s essential. It defines the total experience. Our editorial inspires the customer, and our product pages – the way we show how clothes fit and move – are our virtual sales associates. Using live models help show the movement and flow of a garment in a way that is often difficult to replicate with mannequins alone.
All of the efforts we have made for this particular studio in terms of technology, scale, and talent are designed to deliver high quality photography and product detail our consumers appreciate, especially when shopping for fashion. With this new studio, we will now have a larger footprint in the fashion industry, which will help us continue to strengthen our relationships across the entire spectrum—with brands, designers, and creative talent. This is part of our plan to innovate in how fashion is displayed on the site and become the best possible place for fashion brands to present themselves online.
Why India as only the third such location?
Amazon Fashion is growing at a scorching pace in India – we are the largest fashion destination in the country today with 2 million fashion products and 15,000 fashion brands. We have an exhaustive portfolio of top fashion brands on our Fashion store. Brands like Under Armour, New Balance, Steve Madden, Michael Kors, Juicy Couture and many more have partnered with us to make their fashion selection easily accessible to millions of customers in India. Some of these brands have no retail or offline presence in the country and are available only through us.
We are excited to see this growth and demand – excited to be able to deliver exactly what are customers are looking for and the brands they absolutely love. This launch is yet another investment in making our customers’ fashion journey much more engaging by serving our partnering brands’ asset online exactly how they are offline. We launched New York Studio in 2013 and then in London to support our European Fashion business in 2015. I think we are ready to have a facility of this scale in India to further support our rapidly growing business.
This is a transformative time in Fashion in India and we are leading this change. We will continue to make investments here to serve our customers a delightful shopping experience.
How long has this been in the works?
For over one and a half years..
Tell us about the party?
We officially launched the studio yesterday and we have gathered our partners from the industry including brands/designers and creative talent to showcase our space which is one of its kind in India and the largest standalone imaging studio in the country.
We created beautiful installations of our merchandise and partnering brands so our guests could browse through the kind of selection we have on our marketplace. We also had a beautiful photobooth designed inside one of our actual high-tech photo-bays where guests got themselves clicked by ELLE and enjoy the experience.
The party had a mixed crowd, directly or indirectly connected to the business of fashion. We are giving them a taste of what the future of fashion looks like in today’s digital economy and we look forward to working closely with the industry to make them a part of this transformation.
Take a look inside the studio:
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