“Yandex. Market will begin producing clothes under its own brands

Yandex.Market, which sells on its platform products of brands that have left the Russian market, in particular the Swedish H&M, decided to launch clothes under its own brands. Thus, the company registers the brands Tame, Muted and Humanform for adult and children’s clothing in the middle price segment. Other marketplaces, seeking to increase their share of the fast-growing online clothing sales market, are also creating their own lines. But this experience was not successful for everyone. Wildberries, for example, refused such a project.

Yandex (MOEX: YNDX) in March filed applications to register the trademarks Tame, Muted and Humanform, including for classes related to clothing, and found “Kommersant” in the Rospatent database. Yandex.Market confirmed to Kommersant that the company plans to develop its own clothing brands in the middle price segment for adults and children. They clarified that they plan to produce clothes “at the facilities of different factories and countries,” for example in China and Uzbekistan.

Yandex.Market has been developing its own trademarks (private brands) since 2021, but we are also talking about electronics and household appliances (Tuvio), furniture (Pragma), and children’s products (Junion). Before this, the marketplace did not have its own clothing brands.

The company calls the fashion direction one of the fastest growing in the e-commerce market. Thus, on the Yandex.Market site in the fourth quarter of 2023, the assortment of clothing increased by 3.7 times year on year. According to Fashion Consulting Group (FCG), in 2023, every third ruble on clothes and shoes was spent in the online channel, where three quarters of sales come from marketplaces.

At the same time, according to FCG analysts, 86% of the marketplace market is occupied by Ozon and Wildberries. These players are actively increasing sales in the fashion category; the specialized online store Lamoda competes with them, while Yandex.Market lags behind these platforms in terms of demand among sellers, says One Story partner Olga Sumishevskaya. Although, she continues, Yandex.Market has been trying to develop this direction for a long time, but has not decided on positioning and assortment.

The launch of private labels in various directions allows Yandex.Market to build sufficient differentiation in categories where the site has strong competitors who are far ahead in terms of turnover, says General Director of Infoline-Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov. Other online platforms are also developing their own clothing brands. In 2022, Ozon launched sales of clothing under the Hola brand for adults and children. Lamoda plans to begin selling clothing under its own brands Nume and Mademan in April 2024 (see Kommersant, March 14).

Samokat launched its Arive clothing brand in 2023, as well as Konda sporting goods. Wildberries stopped producing private label clothing in 2020 and, as the company reported, does not yet have its own brands.

Yandex.Market associates the launch of its own fashion brands with a strategy to expand its assortment. Ozon also noted that private labels only complement the assortment matrix in niches where the supply of sellers does not completely cover demand. Marketplaces, due to their complete analytics, can see which niches are not completely filled in order to close them, notes fashion market analyst Olga Steinberg. Also, an online platform can sell private label goods cheaper than most goods on the site, promote its products on the site and, accordingly, receive stable additional income, she lists.

Yandex.Market says that it presents products in different price segments from both Russian and foreign brands. Thus, the site sells products of the Swedish brand H&M, which left Russia in 2022 after the outbreak of the military conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. But some sites are gradually stopping sales of brands that have left the country.

For example, Lamoda reported that they are selling off the remaining goods from Japanese Uniqlo and replacing it with other offers. According to a representative of the online store, the company did not make any new deliveries of Uniqlo products. Experts, however, do not connect the departure of international brands with the trend of launching private labels. According to Mikhail Burmistrov, products of departed brands are supplied through parallel imports and demand for them, on the contrary, has shifted to marketplaces.

Polina Gritsenko