When Xixili Intima Sdn Bhd decided to take a chance in transforming its traditional brick–and-mortar model to explore an omni-channel experience by going online, it feared that this would cannibalise its offline business.
On the contrary, however, this strategy not only increased the homegrown lingerie brand’s sales but also helped it understand its customers’ shopping patterns better. The 15-year-old company had started with the idea of making lingerie more appealing in Malaysia, not just as undergarments to provide good support and fit, but as something more fashionable. Going digital was just the next step in the growth curve.
“When we first started, we honestly thought going digital would cannibalise our brick-and-mortar business, so we had to work with our current sales team, convincing them that we are trying to not cut into their sales [and commissions]. The market is quite small. Malaysia only has 32 million people and we can only cater to half that population — the women,” Xixili’s chief marketing officer Tara Tan points out. “A few months after launching the webstore, we were looking at the product analysis and we realised that our online presence would not kill off our boutiques, and both these platforms would instead play a complementary role.
“We sell a lot of fit and support, so our core products are items like high panel bras that sell at RM169 and above. These products move a lot better at our boutiques because we have a sales representative to pitch it to the customer. Online, we are selling a lot of the entry-level products such as T-shirt bras because those start a lower price point,” she says.
Xixili started its online journey in 2011 when it decided to set up a social media account and start building a customer database. “We are a mid-sized SME and quite the traditional type that was operated out of a physical store. Apart from boutiques, we also have consignment source accounts where we service departmental stores.
We took baby steps in going digital.”
Changes in customer behaviour and their affinity for making online purchases prompted Xixili to list its products on marketplaces. “We started consigning our products on marketplaces — on Zalora, to start with. That was very easy for a brick-and mortar business. We just moved our products to their warehouse and they did all the selling and promoting.” A year later, it started selling its products on 11Street Malaysia, which would require Xixili to do the fulfillment itself. But even this didn’t truly set it apart. In 2016, Xixili decided to work with Maxis to set up its own online store. “By then, the retail landscape had already changed quite a lot and there was already a huge shift towards online sales.”
Despite its foray into online channels, the company remained cautious because “online” was not its forte. “So, we sat down and discussed Maxis’ proposal and decided to give it a try. We thought it was better to try with Maxis on board rather than by ourselves and not know what we were doing,” says Tan. Xixili’s webstore was launched in January last year using Maxis eCommerce solutions. During that process, Tan shares that the team from Maxis took pains to not only design the processes but also to understand the workings of the lingerie firm and its business.
“Maxis did the scoping with us and development like the back-programming and coding. They also assisted us on digital marketing, where they helped us to reach out to online customers through digital advertising and worked closely with us on our marketing plans..” As Xixili does not have a loyalty programme at its boutiques, the company was not able to gauge its customers’ behaviour well enough. Here’s where Maxis’ insights and analytics tools came in handy. “When you go online, you get a lot more data on your sales, customers and consumer behaviour, everything that you can’t possibly do offline. Maxis helped us mine that data, analyse it and then project it on to our forward marketing and promotional strategies. With the physical outlets, our customers could be coming from anywhere because lingerie is not the kind of thing you buy every day and people are willing to travel to a big shopping mall for their fashion needs,” Tan says. All this became clear when Xixili had its own online platform because it was sending off the products to specific postcodes. “So, now that we have data, we can consider opening a boutique or running promotional campaigns in those locations,” she points out.
One demographic it honed in on during the campaign period was women in their 20s — it saw a 450% increase in sales in this demographic.
“We realised that with our discounted products, we were tapping the younger market, which is interesting because Xixili is a mass premium brand and our customers tend to be from the 35-to-50 age group,” she says. There were also more male customers, which, Tan points out, could mean one of two things — either men are more comfortable shopping for lingerie online for their partners, or their partners are using their credit cards to do so. Currently, its webstore only services domestic orders and those from Singapore but Tan notes that the company has shipped orders to customers from all around the world “with zero marketing and presence”.
Maxis’ head of business development Senthil Balan Danapalan says Maxis eCommerce solutions are targeted at helping SMEs recognise the ample opportunities out there. He adds that its solutions have helped some of its SME customers see an over 30% increase in their own customer base and boosted online sales by at least 40%. This, he says, is because the e-commerce segment in Malaysia, which is valued at US$1 billion, is expected to grow two to three times larger in the next five years. “Based on research by PwC*, almost 50% of Malaysians consumers make online purchases monthly and 60% started shopping online in the last three years. SMEs need an online presence to stay relevant to hyper-connected consumers and integrate it with their physical presence to ultimately drive a successful omni-channel strategy. We have an experienced team and solutions at attractive pricing levels to SMEs to help them realise their e-commerce potential,” says Senthil.