“If I had to sum up our experience with Marmeto in a sentence, I’d say - High ownership, high trust.” - Yogesh Kabra, Founder @ XYXX Apparels.

The athleisure and inner-wear market in India has seen good growth year on year for the past decade. However, when Yogesh Kabra founded XYXX back in 2017, the landscape wasn’t as diverse as it is today.

After returning from the US, Yogesh realized that there was a lack of good and comfortable innerwear in India. Most of the brands available used a common and basic quality fabric, while following into the footsteps of market leaders like Jockey. The other few brands available such as US Polo and Van Huesen lacked in providing a wide or different range of innerwear as well. 

“I realized that there was massive scope for product innovation in this segment. Not only the product, but also the overall buying experience could be elevated and had huge scope for innovation.” says Yogesh.

 

 

The MicroModal comfort!

When XYXX started operations, the fabric used for the men’s innerwear soon became their USP. “In the early days, no brand in India used the TENCEL™ MicroModal fabric for innerwear. Cut to today, where over 100 brands use the same fabric for innerwear and related products!” adds Yogesh. 

For a brand that is driven by comfort and quality, MicroModal fabric was the perfect choice! It is THE premium underwear fabric across the world which is extracted from the pulp of beech wood trees in most Austria. It's three times softer than cotton, is feather-light, cooler to touch, and up to 50 percent more moisture absorbent than cotton, making it the perfect fabric for India’s weather. MicroModal is also biodegradable and natural. This means any clothing made with MicroModal will return to the earth within one’s lifetime. 

Channel Diversification, not Brand Dilution.

Today, XYXX retails on every major marketplace and supplies to approximately 10,000 brick and mortar stores across the top 50 cities in India. Despite these impressive & diversified channels, Yogesh stresses the importance of building a consumer-friendly and high-quality ecommerce website. He further adds that, “An ecommerce website must be representative of the brand and the experience it aims at providing the end consumer. Since you have end to end control on every functionality of the website, it is a vital part of your  online revenue sources, especially for innovative new customer acquisition.” 

The Shopify Journey

Just like every brand that migrates to Shopify over time, XYXX also had their fair share of experiencing other ecommerce platforms before feeling the full force of Shopify by their side!

“We started with a website on Magento. With a tech consultant, we tried to run operations on this site. However, tech brings along a lot of churn which is very tough to maintain at a small scale. We soon ran into problems and realized the need to switch to a better platform, built and suited to ecommerce!” says Yogesh. 

“By this point, Marmeto had carved their space as a leading Shopify development agency, especially in the D2C space in India. When a couple of other startup founders referred to Marmeto, I had an introductory call with Saurav and thus began our journey with Marmeto!” says Yogesh.

 

The Marmeto <> XYXX Connect

“In our early days with Marmeto, I worked closely with Saurav. The reason we’ve continued our relationship with Marmeto, better than ever, is because of the way they conduct business.

Saurav or the team is not driven by money. What I mean by that is, they always prioritize that which is in the consumer’s best interest.” he added.
What makes Yogesh say this?

“There have been instances when I wanted to develop a specific feature because I was convinced of its need. But Saurav was straight with me. He told me why it wasn’t a useful feature and suggested an alternate path that required lesser development whereas he could have just executed what was asked for, to increase billables. Situations like these reaffirm my faith in them as tech partners.”  said Yogesh. 

XYXX recently came aboard Shopify Plus for more control over the checkout functionalities and customizations. We’ve built various features and solutions for them over the months, some of which include:

• Single Click Discount at Checkout
• Mobile Number OTP verification for COD
• The 2-step checkout process
• Prepaid Incentivization to reduce COD returns

Our Shopify Plus journey with XYXX is just the beginning of the marathon that lies ahead.