Will online only private fashion labels ecommerce succeed in India?

Last Friday Mint carried an article “Private fashion labels flood the Net” (article no longer available on livemint.com). Ecommerce players in India have been continuously experimenting (or innovating) to crack the puzzle. For e.g. Myntra was into corporate sales are now  in retail, exclusively.in (which was for NRIs only) is now concentrating on their privateSher Singh (for domestic market only). Deal sites are slowly converting to normal ecommerce sites.

Few points from the article,

• Brands have been created only for online shoppers (you cannot buy them in the offline shops)
• Indian private label brands: Sher Singh, Pudu Lifestyle, Stiff Collar
• 27.2 million internet users in India shop online according to comscore. In terms of unique users apparel/accessories grew by 160% in 2011 over 2010 (deal sites grew by 600%)
• Size of lifestyle category (apparel, footwear, accessories) in India: $50 billion, growing at 16% CAGR. By 2015 it will grow to $100 billion, 6-8% of this will be from online.
• Reason for buying from these sites: Lack of time to visit shops, non-metros don’t have access to branded shops, convenience of access.
• Majority of shopping happens between 1 pm and 4 pm.
• Myntra.com gets over 200,000 visitors and 5,000 transactions a day.
• Private labels are getting orders from Jharkhand, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Cool!

There was an interesting line in the article – 50% of Myntra’s business comes from the top 10 cities. But the remaining 50% comes from outside these cities (am I missing something?).

Apparel is a difficult item to buy online because we like to try it on but things change. And once things change these sites will rock. So far I have never bought from these sites, I will try them out.