F2FMART Enabling Businesses to Successfully Pivot in the Pandemic
09 November 2020: As Fibre2Fashion continues to expand its product offerings, serving the textile, apparel and fashion industry remains at the heart of the 20-year-old company. Fibre2Fashion is now in the process of empowering wholesale businesses through its B2B platform F2FMART with digital tools, access and incentives to sell their ready-to-ship products worldwide and grow their customer base with its reach of 600,000 registered companies globally.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the worldwide fashion and luxury industry saw a 60-70% reduction in sales and over 25% of fashion MSMEs in South and Southeast Asia shut their businesses. As the industry was trying to navigate the challenging landscape, Fibre2Fashion launched F2FMART, a platform dedicated to helping businesses leverage its digital channels for stock liquidation as well as to build resiliency and sustainable growth.
With over 100 merchants and MSMEs getting on board so far, the platform has partnered with leading manufacturers Mothercare and Zalando from U.K., PDS Trading Shanghai, India-based Global Textiles, Manisha Fashion, Anjali Fabrics, and Spinning King, amongst many other sellers onboarding the platform now. F2FMART’s sellers have a total estimated inventory worth INR 500 million to offer.
“We provide innovative marketing tools that help textile and apparel manufacturing companies and wholesalers, with ready to sell material, to reach the right buyers, at the right time and best price,” says Adi Kapadia, Head of e-commerce at Fibre2Fashion.
International sellers can build a virtual store on F2FMART for their ready-to-sell stock. The store is dynamically upgraded, and its marketing is done online and through periodic virtual trade fairs organised on the Fibre2Fashion platform to receive exclusive buyers’ inquiry.
“We offer real-time connection with personalised buying experience, covering our vast international database of online buyers, including enterprises, buying houses, design, product merchandising and sourcing agents. Plus, there is back-end support through online chat and F2F customer support team to solve queries and facilitate increased buyer-seller transactions,” adds Kapadia.
With consultancy firm Bain predicting digital shopping will be 30% of total sales by 2025, up from 12% in 2019, the change in consumer behaviour with respect to online shopping is here to stay. Moreover, the pandemic has also given rise to new opportunities in areas such as demands for work-from-home wear, PPE and other essential goods. Therefore, it is imperative for businesses to embrace digitisation to capitalise on new pandemic-related customer acquisition opportunities.
www.fibre2fashion.com
