Indian fashion shopping is increasingly shifting from search-led to discovery-led purchases, with consumers buying products they encounter through videos and creator content rather than products they were actively looking for.
That shift is becoming a meaningful business for Myntra. Creator-led and social commerce now account for about 10% of its revenue, a business that did not exist in its current form about two years ago.
The -owned fashion platform, which started selling through creators in December 2024, expects this part of its business to grow faster than India’s social-commerce market over the next two to three years. The aim is to get more creators to make product-focused content and to make it easier for shoppers to move from watching that content to buying something.
Content first
India’s social-commerce market is expected to grow at about 22-24% a year, according to Redseer Strategy Consultants. The company expects its creator-led business to grow faster than the rest and capture a larger share of its overall business.
The reason, it says, is simple: people are changing how they discover products. Shoppers who interact with social-commerce content have baskets that are more than 40% higher on average, while creator-led content can result in a 10% increase in conversion, according to the company.
“We see people wanting to be content first. That’s a massive behaviour change,” Lakshminarayan Swaminathan, chief product officer, said in an interview with Mint.
In the old model, a shopper generally knew what they wanted before opening a shopping app. They searched for a shirt, a pair of shoes or a lipstick and then decided what to buy. The new model starts earlier: a shopper sees something interesting and only then starts thinking about buying it.
“Rather than only becoming a dukan (shop) where you come once you know that I want this, our job is to give the right inspiration and discovery,” Swaminathan said.
There is, however, a limit to how far the company wants to go with content. It does not want to become another Instagram or YouTube, where content itself is the main product. Instead, it wants videos and creators to help shoppers discover products and eventually buy them.
For online fashion companies, the battle may increasingly begin before the search box is opened. The strategy has a parallel in too, which has also brought creators into its shopping business. In its initial public offering (IPO) documents, the company describes content commerce as a model in which creators use short videos and live streams on Meesho and social-media platforms to help shoppers discover products, while sellers use those creators to promote their merchandise.
Content commerce generated ₹707 crore in net merchandise value in fiscal year 2024-25 (FY25), within two years of its launch, according to the company’s IPO documents. Meesho describes the model as bringing together three groups: creators, sellers and consumers.
The scale of Myntra’s own business is also growing. The company’s operating revenue rose from ₹2,407 crore in FY21 to ₹6,043 crore in FY25, according to the company’s financials accessed through the business intelligence platform Tofler. Content commerce makes about 10% of this revenue, Mint has learnt from industry insiders.
Operating profit moved from a loss of ₹369 crore to ₹442 crore over the same period, while net profit rose to ₹548.5 crore in the latest figures available.
Creator commerce
The creator-commerce push is no longer a small experiment on the sidelines of the main business. The creator base is growing alongside the platform, too. The platform has nearly 10 million creator sign-ups, with about 500,000 active creators each month, Swaminathan said.
Shoppers, influencers and other creators have generated more than 20 million pieces of content, while creator video content has grown about 20 times in the past year, he added.
The activity is not limited to the shopping app. After affiliate features were introduced on Instagram and Facebook, about 650,000 creators became active and generated around 3 million posts that send shoppers back to the platform, Swaminathan said. More than 1 million Instagram users signed up in a month, while Facebook added about 1.3 million sign-ups during the rollout.
The increase in content is also changing the advertising industry. Mint on 30 September reported that is building “content factories” as brands demand hundreds or even thousands of versions of campaigns for social media, e-commerce, connected TV and other digital platforms.
AI is helping companies create and adapt this content faster and at lower cost. Instead of simply using those savings to reduce advertising budgets, brands are using them to make more content in more formats.
For the fashion platform, that means having more opportunities to put products in front of shoppers before they search for them. Its Glamstream, a video and shopping feature inside the app, has about 7 million users a month, who spend roughly 2.1 million hours on it each month. Gen Z accounts for 52% of its views, Swaminathan said.
The next step is to bring brands and sellers more directly into this system. The company is testing ways for sellers to find relevant creators, add products to their content, and track what happens afterwards, from views and clicks to sales.
“What we believe will really strengthen this is bringing the sellers and brands also onto this,” Swaminathan said, adding that it would be a major focus over the next three years.