Bringing Brands and Data Together: A Nitty Gritti Showcase

Episode 30
35:32

About this Podcast:

Welcome to a new episode of The Retail Podcast by Vue.ai. In this podcast, we speak to leaders in retail that are consistently pushing the needle and at the center of innovation. Today, we’re putting the spotlight on Nitty Gritti. The company was founded by Anand Siva and Nikita Bhargav with the ambition to build a platform that brings together data analytics, insights and smart content to give customers a confident buying experience, as well as being a communication platform that doesn’t compromise on its ethos. This is what led to founding Nitty Gritti. We have Anand Siva, the co-founder and head of business excellence at Integrity, always a solutions man. After a multi-decade long career in mainstream advertising, his solution first mindset led him to transition into the data analytics space. With this move came a new dimension where brand and data came together to chart new journeys in the customer engagement space for leading global brands. Our next guest is Nikita Bhargav, the co-founder and head of brand success at Nitty Gritti. She brings the enthusiasm and drive to help clients grow and thrive in a dynamic marketplace. Nikita has over a decade of experience in e-commerce, of which the last six years were at Amazon, where her role was to manage and grow some of the most critical high value brands for Amazon Fashion. 

Listen to the specific part

01:59
Nitty Gritti's Business Model and Growth
05:06
How do they embrace going online
11:13
Playing a role in creating content journey experience
20:41
True personalization vs Mass personalization
38:33
Working with Vue.ai

Episode Transcript:

Akshara : [00:00:23] Welcome to a new episode of The Retail Podcast by Vue.ai. In this podcast, we speak to leaders in retail that are consistently pushing the needle and at the center of innovation. Today, we're putting the spotlight on Nitty gritti. The company was founded by Anand Siva and Nikita Bhargav with the ambition to build a platform that brings together data analytics, insights and smart content to give customers a confident buying experience, as well as being a communication platform that doesn't compromise on its ethos. This is what led to founding Nitty Gritti. With that, I'd like to introduce you to today's guests. We have Anand Siva, the co-founder and head of business excellence at Integrity, always a solutions man. After a multi-decade long career in mainstream advertising, his solution first mindset led him to transition into the data analytics space. With this move came a new dimension where brand and data came together to chart new journeys in the customer engagement space for leading global brands. Our next guest is Nikita Bhargav, the co-founder and head of brand success at Nitty Gritti. With over twenty five years of industry experience working with leading Indian and global brands, Nikita lives and breathes brand marketing in her role. Here, she brings the enthusiasm and drive to help clients grow and thrive in a dynamic marketplace. Nikita has over a decade of experience in e-commerce, of which the last six years were at Amazon, where her role was to manage and grow some of the most critical high value brands for Amazon Fashion. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Anand: [00:01:53] Our pleasure. Totally. Thank you for having us. Nikita: [00:01:57] Thanks! Akshara : [00:01:59] Great, so let's jump in. Anand and Nikita, why don't you just tell us a little bit about what Nitty-Gritti does, your business model and the growth you've seen in the past year? I believe you were in the market. You had gone out in the market nine months ago, so talk to us a little bit about that. Anand: [00:02:19] You want to go. Nikita: [00:02:21] You go first. Anand: [00:02:23] Ok. I think I think it's a very interesting story that we had. It's exactly about I think about a year and a half ago in the month of March last year that Nikita and I started our conversation about content on e-commerce and catalogs and what brands were doing. And this is the peak of the lockdown and when businesses were actually looking pretty different, right? And one of the things that struck us was the fact that brands were paying very little attention to the quality of content that was going out there on the e-commerce space. A lot of retailing that's going when they create their television commercials, they do their social when they do their POS and all of that, but not so much in the content space on e-commerce. And we noticed that as the number of shoppers was increasing as lockdown was driving more traffic to the web sales and e-commerce sales, there should be something that must be done about changing the quality and even the attitude towards content, not just the quality. Right. So that started our sort of very curious conversation that led on to a desire to build something that could bring in technology to drive this change. Anand: [00:03:31] And we spent about three months looking for a good tech solution that could help us get into the market with a content story. But we really didn't come across anything that was custom built or even remotely available for automating content, and you need to automate if you're looking at content in e-commerce space. So we spent the next nine months building a tool at Nitty Gritti. By the way, I must tell you, we call ourselves Anand: Nitty Gritti with a very specific purposes because we believe that the attention to the detail is what is important when you create content for e-commerce. So we built a tool and called textmatics, which which we'll talk about more later and show what the tool is, what allows us to either create or evaluate existing content and change the complexion of what customers experience when they go through a catalog in the e-commerce space. And that's the mantra of saying, how can we help brands establish a superior customer experience for people shopping online? Akshara : [00:04:32] Right. You know, I think, yeah, that's that's really interesting, but what I wanted to actually talk about even before we get into the nitty gritty is if I had to say. Through the pandemic, we've also seen that traditional retail has had to step up and kind of significantly embrace going online. People who never had a digital setup before have had to completely change their mindset and everything. And in that context, can you tell us why you chose this space of content and to work on this particular problem in retail? Anand: [00:05:06] I think that it's still was the opportunity and the challenge for the the opportunity for us and the challenge for brand, right? You know, something very interesting. The 55 plus age group was the largest boom sector for online shopping during the lockdown. Understandably, right. And this segment was never expected to take onto the e-shopping as much as they did because of the lockdown. The lockdown turned out to be a catalyst to the e-commerce space. The reason that we wanted content to sort of start stand out is very simple, right? Imagine a store right when you walk in or when I walk in or somebody was seventy five years old walks into a store. The salesperson there is able to quickly convert or change the speed, depending on the audience. Right? A washing machine sold to a 75 year old man. It's not the same with a sold to a 40 year old woman or a thirty five in the thirties couple. He quickly changes the speed, depending on the target audience that you can't do in the e-commerce space. But the fact is that you have all of these audiences coming onto the e-commerce space very much like they walk into a brick and mortar store so that one piece of content actually replaces that smart salesperson there. And that piece of content has also got to appeal to each one of these very uniquely different audience segments. That is the pressure on content on catalog, and that's the space that excites us saying, how do we make brands realize that this content cannot be just a product field, but has to appeal to a larger audience across a variety of, multi-varient right, from age group, from gender, from where they come, from their background, the way, the way even they pay between a COD and a card or a banking transaction. So we sort of embarked on this to help brands create content that could become universally impressive, but yet exclusively targeted in a space. Nikita: [00:07:01] Yes. Well, I can I can actually throw a little bit of insight into what actually happened in 2020. We just didn't just see a digital transformation. We also saw that internet started playing a very critical role in our in our life and our day to day life. You know that people had to move to e-commerce because the situation demanded that and an industry which was growing at seven to eight percent, I think suddenly was had moved by 30 odd percent, you know, therefore, it became important that customers knew what they were getting into people who did not want to, who didn't normally shop it also online. They were also looking at other forms of online like classes went online, doctor's appointment went online. Your UPI transactions, which I think 2020 saw together what what India saw in the last previous three years, all happening in one year. So a lot of things actually culminated to e-commerce growing that way and back on on the customer base. I think brands are constantly looking at force fitting content, which is offline into online, and that is not the ideal experience. We do see a lot of digital brands, the digital first brands who who will stand out in that experience because they're thinking digital. You know, you will see that they're far more focused on your on their on their content. And we feel that the tool that we have, we can even get that far more shopper. Akshara : [00:08:43] Absolutely, and I think what both of you have said about the value of content, I think is really interesting. Can you touch a little bit upon this world of content? Right content can come across as something that's fairly broad. It could apply to many things. So can you talk a little bit more specifically about the areas of content that you're actively working on with the tool? And how, like, give us maybe some examples of what you just said, right? Force fitting content doesn't work, so maybe online it has to be approached a certain way. So I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. Anand: [00:09:21] Because I continue the conversation, Nikita: [00:09:22] I think, yeah, so I I think I think the like I said that, you know, most brands were force fitting it. We realized that the customer is while the customer is looking for the same thing, every customer is actually unique and every customer is at a different job. Whereas when he lands on a detail page, which is which is really the proof of pudding, if I have to equate it to what? What would that be in the offline space? It would actually be a customer looking at a product or going to a trial room and trying out the product. It's that stage that you actually decide to discard the product or add it to your cart. You know, so so that experience becomes critical. And in the absence of no touch and feel the storytelling there and the story that you're actually trying to talk about in a way that connects with the customer becomes really important. You know, like right from the from the title onwards, you know which which aids those four things that the customer is looking for before, even before he even clicks on that on that product and goes to the detail page on the detail page. What how do customers actually look at a product? So is that sequence in the way that the customer is actually looking for a product? What is the storytelling? We know that customers don't like to read too much. Are you visually saying everything that the customer wants to see? It's those bits, and that's what the tool actually does. We've actually broken down every detail page. If I had to look at Amazon as a case study, the Amazon Detail page into 180 little parameters which are broken down for you, which which the tool actually analyzes and throws up a score to you. So that's that's how detailed we are about content. Akshara : [00:11:13] Well, hundred and eighty parameters is quite detailed, and I can imagine on even a marketplace, maybe even if it's not Amazon, it's a busy marketplace and it's got these different categories, completely different infrastructure. I think it would be really important for brands to pay attention to this. If I have to ask you a brand, when a brand works with nitty-gritti, what is that whole journey look like? Where do they start and how do they get to that point of having an extremely robust and holistic content catalog, right? Like this is, I think, where we like for our audience to understand a little bit more about how gritty plays a role in creating that entire content journey experience. Nikita: [00:12:02] Um, OK, I'll go Anand and start. So basically, we would divide them into two types of brands one would be one that's already on Amazon, and therefore there is a certain amount of traction that the brand already has. So we normally audit a page and tell you where we think the gaps are and we fix the gaps. Basis again. One eighty parameters. But if it's an absolutely new brand, I think the work is a lot more. We actually understand the landscape, understand what what their close competition is like, not just in in in this particular geography. We could be looking at other geographies as well to understand best practices. And then we we start from scratch. So if it was an apparel, a product, our view would be completely different. And and that's where you guys actually come into the picture. We we pull out an attribute sheet based on just images and that becomes the gospel for us to write a detailed page. Again, it's all on the tool, so we keep ticking off 180 parameters. It's it's it's a live score. And at the end of the end of the page, you know where your score is and you know where your content's actually sitting. So you will have a gold standard catalog by the time you finish with with a page with us. Akshara : [00:13:27] Anand, were you where you're going to add something to that. Anand: [00:13:29] Yeah. Let me add a little operational dimension to this right how how business works. You see that a lot of problems that we are trying to address here, not just to put content into work. It's about how how much the brands really understand the importance of each of these elements in a page. They all exist with a purpose. You have a title for a very particular reason. You have images for a very particular reason. You have a bullet for a particular reason. And then you have a series of other components like your description, what we call the premium plus location and so on and so forth. Right. And within this, there are subsets. I think what should your first bullet look like? What should it communicate? How do you communicate that mistake that happens or the struggle that brands have trouble understanding? You're saying, what is the sequence in which the content must appear? Because it looks, it's a storytelling process, right? And the problem arises because most brands tend to see each of these components in isolation and not as a single unified story, because for the customer, it's one journey and she searches for something. She finds the title first and when she looks in the title, she needs to find the product that she is looking for. Anand: [00:14:37] And then when she goes to the images, she needs to connect with the image in her household, in her life. So each of these components have to come together in an orchestrated manner to deliver that customer experience. And that's the approach we take to be going to actually tell them the things you already have existing content. Let us tell you how effective your story is, which is why we give the story a score, right? And then we break it down to think which part of the story is not delivering to the score. Whether you losing out on this chapter or the images slowing you down or the bullet slowing you down. So the story sort of takes shape with these finer details looked into. But if it's a new brand like Nikita said, the job is a little tougher, but it's a lot easier to build because you're starting a new story, a new chapter on the blank page, so the ability to stitch it together in the right manner is better. But the work is a lot more because it starts with the strategy and the thinking. But the aspect that are trying to help brands realize is that your storytelling from a customer experience perspective needs to be a lot sharper. Akshara : [00:15:39] Right. You know, I think Anand, you had pointed out something really interesting, right? Your you talked about how there's a certain part of the story that might not necessarily fit with this course, right? I just want to step back a little and understand this is, of course, in the last two years, things have changed even more because of the pandemic. But I want to understand if you had to look at even the last five to 10 years. How do you think that has changed right now? You have that analytical ability and tools like yours and companies like yours to do that. But how much do you think brands themselves has themselves have adopted this mindset of wanting a holistic experience for their customers on the site? Have they actually changed, or is it still something that needs a lot more convincing? And you need to actually show them how the whole thing works before they are convinced that this is something they need? Anand: [00:16:32] Yeah, yeah. I think that's a very tricky spot in the whole business, actually, right? One of the challenges that we face as a business and we talk to brands is a brand manager could look at us and say, OK, I hear you guys. I understand there are gaps. Now I'm going to fix those gaps, but you need to tell me, how can I be sure that fixing these gaps is going to turn around my business in some way? What is it going to be? The delta that I'm going to see in my business because I changed title from Option eight to Option B right now? That's that's the challenge, right? But let me go back to the larger question that you are right. See, I spent my first part of my career in mainstream advertising when there wasn't so much of data to play with. We were just going on customer insights and market associations and so forth. But the last 10, 15 years I've been dabbling with a lot of stuff under the data space, right? So marketers using data to make informed decisions and to do a course correction during part of a campaign or during a sales month isn't new at all. It's done. There are plenty of brands who have mastered this very well, and they go on to use it. There are ways of blended, and they look at data driven marketing, right? But when you come to e-commerce, because we are still in a highly discounted marketplace, this country still sells a lot because of the price difference. Anand: [00:17:53] Right? As long as you can keep rolling out offers, as long as you can keep buying during your festival periods and your seasons, you will start seeing a big boom. But the actual challenge ups of the brand being the first among equals. Let's assume that it's a washing machine, and let's assume that all the washing machines are priced between 8K and 30k. How does your content stand out and tell the customer that this is the product you should be picking up? That's not data that's actually understanding the customer online, buying experience and expectations better to deliver content that she or he will have to pick up. So it is data of a kind but heavy which shopping insights that I think comes out of a large and large amount of time that we've spent in understanding these categories, understanding the market places across global markets and bringing them into a tool that can ensure that we are able to deliver that consistent experience. I think that's where the technology comes to play. How are you able to keep it updated? How were you able to keep it current and how were you able to keep it adaptable? Because as things change, the tool can respond faster than anybody else can. Akshara : [00:19:04] Right. Nikita, sorry you wanted to add something to this? Nikita: [00:19:07] Yeah, I think I think the pandemic changed a lot for brands. I think the channel mix went through a huge change. eCom, which was which was a single digit contributor, was suddenly had crossed into double digits, and that's growing every day. So this channel has become a focus area for most brands. We see more and more focus their eCom teams have grown what used to be a two or three member team only executing catalogs going live are now large teams, you know. It's also propelled by the digital first brands who who are aggressive and therefore giving the off-line guys a tough run in this space. Yes, people are looking at it seriously now. Are they ready for us? Some of them are, and some of them still need a lot of coaching. I think we're still very, very we're very new as a concept saying, have you ever evaluated or audited your catalog? And most of them think that they've already have a great catalog of what can be wrong. So you see, brands are at different journeys. They're they're excited that somebody can give them a score and they're always optimistic that they will. They will have a very high score, and they're quite shocked when we tell them that, hello, there are gaps that need to be fixed. So, yeah, it is. It is a journey which brands have to get on and we hope to get them there Akshara : [00:20:41] Right. That's really, that's really interesting to know that brands are surprised by their scores. And, you know, I think this is the same even when it's even with Vue.ai. I think a lot of times our customers and leads have been surprised by how non intuitive a lot of their journeys are and how they actually need, like true personalization, not mass personalization. So I think, you know, there's a lot of parallels there. What I also wanted to talk about was, you know, for example, I was looking at the solutions on your on your on the nitty gritti website and I was looking at it was very interesting to see that you've broken the solution down into a checkout back, a corrective pack and a creative back. So can you can you tell us what are the kind of I mean, what are the kind of brands and that come to you? And what are the solutions that they go for? Like, is there a typical brand that's that's kind of looking for a character pack? Or is it a typical brand that looks for a check up pack? How does that usually work for nitty-gritti? Ok. I think we're getting a very mixed kind of mixed bag of brands coming in right before I tell you the kind of brands that are coming at what we're doing. If we tell you what these three packs actually qualify because they are the core of our business. And like I said, you could be a brand that was already listed and you want to evaluate that the urge you to evaluate before you make any changes. That's why we call it the check. Go back and do a check and understand where it is. And that's because a lot of first generation brands that have been there for maybe, what, three years, five years when I say first generation, first on e-commerce have been there for quite a few years and they really haven't bothered to go back and look at it. You know how current it is and how effective it is, but how compliant it is and so on because it needs to be checked. And then once you've checked, you identify the gaps. You have a very detailed report that comes out almost the analogy that I've been giving people is the equivalent of an MRI. So we break it down to such great detail, but that's not the end output. Anand: [00:23:55] I would put this to use the MRI and take corrective steps. Then we get into the correction part, which is about fixing the title, fixing the bullet, fixing the way to getting into photography if required, maybe creating 3D models and so on and so forth. So the content gets created based on what the report is. Therefore, that's why we call it the character pack. And the final one is about four brands that need to either launch a completely new series of products. Or maybe they're getting listed for the first time and you want to create a catalog from scratch, so you actually end up creating one right from the word go right. So very simply put, check what you have correct what needs to be fixed or create something completely new? Right? So we we sort of have a mixed bag of brands that are brands that come to us and say, Please do the audit for me. Tell me where I'm wrong, but let me get my agency to work on it because I don't have the time to brief another agency or another partner and get through that journey. So we are extremely happy to help them deliver. We help them get gold standard content, so we are flexible in the way we work. Anand: [00:25:01] So we do the audit. We tell them what needs to be corrected. They get the correction done with their agency and they come back to us for our opinion before they publish it. The other one is those brands have said they would like to work with the agency. They have come back and said, Listen, I don't think we've got the crux of what you guys are trying to tell us. Would you please do it for us? So we end up doing the character back ourselves, so we create the content and give it to them and are ready to publish manual. So that's the that's the mixed bag that we sort of evolved. And what's also very interesting is most are cool, by the way. I must tell you this. The tool is automated to score or evaluate. Content that's already published on an Amazon marketplace will be an English speaking marketplace, but it can only automate automated audits and it's going to be faceless. The tool is designed to, you know, automatically score listings on any Amazon platform. But when we publish content and we give the brands content, we are in a position to give them content that can be taken across multiple platforms. So it could be any of the platforms we see in India. Anand: [00:26:08] It could be a Walmart in the US, but it could be a target. The content can be customized depending on the platform, just that we have built an automated tool only to run on one platform because that sort of allows us to create a global benchmark that we need to create content for all other platforms. So brands have been quick. We have been fortunate to work with a variety of brands. We've got really large MNC brands who have come and brought. Some of them even taken the story of how they manage to change content to their counterparts in other geographies. We also had extremely dynamic small brands in India who were taken to an e-commerce first approach will come to us and said this, and I thought I had kickass content, but looks like I could do with some help. And then they've been surprised that. Oh, they got maybe lesser things wrong, but they surely realize that there's more detail that's required. So we worked with a variety of brands to two ends of the spectrum, and it's been a fantastic journey working with these bodies and they both of them come with different challenges and different learnings. But I think we've had great fun working on all of these. Nikita: [00:27:17] just to add to what Anand said, Akshara, I think the categories which reached out to us were categories that saw an uprise during the pandemic and it was across we saw we saw personal hygiene products, food and gourmet beauty. These are these are the brands. We also saw take to us immediately as well. So the bulk of the work we've done is been in the food beauty and in the personal hygiene space. And now, of course, it's widened a bit more. We've got apparel and accessories also. Akshara : [00:27:54] I wanted to understand, I think what's interesting is that you were talking about four or five different categories is the nature of content or the approach to each of these categories very different from each other. Or is it only dependent on the parameters that you have, for example, obviously, the way accessories and apparel is talked about is very different from personal hygiene and food. So how does that aspect of it work in the in the automation process? Nikita: [00:28:24] I think it's absolutely unique to the category and to the subcategory, I don't think it's it's it's like two different customers, it's exactly like that, and the marketplace itself has has defined it differently. And we do understand this customer is the hygiene customer would be very, very different from from what you would look from a beauty product. You would have some similarities, but one would have a far more fashion angle and one may have a more health angle to it. So, yeah, we try and ensure that that what customers are looking for is what what differentiates the categories for us. Akshara : [00:29:05] Absolutely. And I think this ties quite well into my next question. So obviously, in the past few years, the importance of customer experience has been at the forefront for almost every brand and your solutions and everything that you're working on is also centered to what that particular customer needs. So tell us a little bit more about Nitty Gritti's customer first approach to solving problems a little bit more specific and in depth. We'd love to hear about that. Nikita: [00:29:38] So one piece of content, which we believe, especially for brands that are all really live, is is the star ratings. We take that quite as a as a place where we get a lot of insights from. There is also the customer conversation, which is happening below a number of times. Some really key things are that are that customers are asking for should I be there in the content, for example, a customer could be asking for a warranty information and the warranty information could be there in the content. But it could be a last image, or it could be the last bullet of if the content is not app optimized. It's very, very highly possible that you don't really go to the last image. And therefore, if you've understood that customers are asking for warranty, then all it requires is to tweak your content so that it comes up a little early in the customer's journey. Maybe your third image should be something on warranty. Maybe your bullet should be rearranged so that this information is highlighted. So that's the that's the kind of information mining we look at and look at the chatter that's happening and try and bring that into the content that we create or we audit and correct. Anand: [00:30:58] I think the narrator, a real life example that happened on this show, I think can be useful for you. Akshara : [00:31:04] I was just going to for that. Anand: [00:31:06] Oh yeah, I'm sure they'll find it interesting, but we were working on a food brand. Ok? And the marketer was not in agreement with some of the recommendations that we had given right. And during the course of the conversation, we just decided to play into the space and see how we could convince the person. And I said, Listen, let's have the new you're going into a store and you want to pick up, let's say, a bag of chips or maybe a carton. How would you buy it? What are the steps that you take before you decide to drop it into your basket? And it so happened that the way it was explained like this is how I would shop was exactly the methodology that we followed in the content. Right? So the online buyer, the offline buyer, are indifferent. They are the same buyers and you actually moving people from an established, habituated behavior to a very new marketplace. All that is changing is where they are shopping. But the way they look for products, what they want to know, how it fits into their life, they're all the same. That's not going to change. That's very, very fundamental to customer behavior. Right? But your ability to say your content now needs to give that customer the comfort of shopping the way he or she is used to shopping, but delivery digitally is how the transformation happened. So I mean, the moment she sort of described it and said, OK, now it seems to make sense. What are you actually telling me is that you put the content in the exact manner that I as a customer would buy this product and it went through some good things. Not only did she accept what happened, came back two weeks later and got more of a product changed. Which means what she did the first time really worked with. Akshara : [00:32:46] Oh, that's a really cool story. And I think that's really yeah, I think that's really interesting to put yourself. In the shoe of an actual customer, and like you pointed out, I don't think the customer is different, I think just the channel of the method of shopping is different. And I think that that does bring me to my next question. Even in the last two years, we've seen the way we've seen e-commerce change, we've seen the way people shop change, and it's very hard at this point to sit here and obviously predict what's what it's going to look like a few years down the line. But how do you see content playing a very, very primary role in digital shopping experiences? And how do you see that evolving more and more? It already plays a very important role, but is it going to be a make or break for customer experience? Is it going to be something that's really driving people or building brand loyalty building, having people constantly come back to the brand and be loyal to the brand? Is content going to be a central pillar for all of that? Anand: [00:34:13] Akshara, let me tell you this, right? I don't even think we have touched or scratched the surface of the importance of content in the digital buying space. We're still testing. Brands are still I mean, it's the same space, right, 15 20 years ago when I was in my prime advertising days to go until a brand that digital is going to be the way you need to be on a digital platform, you need to have a dot com website seemed like something that was really big. People took a while to adapt to it, right? In all our presentations, digital used to be the last light after that, just before the title slide. That was how insignificant it was then, right? eCom is still in that space. Some brands, but all of them have realized that it's going to be a do or die. Right? And then comes the role of content to play, and we've just started on this journey and most of the platforms that they take on Amazon and Flipkart or Walmart, whatever, they are still toying with a lot of experimentation ideas. They're still working on different because all of them realize that it's going to get even more challenging as customer varieties of customers start coming in. And India is going to be a splendid lab for all of this. But if you're going to get somebody who's coming in from Bihar or from Rajasthan, from Kurnool, who doesn't speak the English language, we want to shop in Telugu or want to shop in Gujarati that you suddenly have to deliver a very different experience, and an automated, A.I Driven translation engine is not going to complete the job. Anand: [00:35:43] It's going to be very clinical and we can't afford to have that in our shopping experience on the other side. There is going to be a big need to drive the touch and feel of the product, which means we're going to see more of our committed reality coming in. We're going to see more technology coming into play, which is also the reason why this year and we decided that we want to take textmatic's to the next level. We said it's time to bring in more technology players and start fostering technologies that can change this for us and be ready when a lot of this happens. So our partnership with Vue was along those lines saying How do we automate more of the stuff? How do we bring in technology that can change the way we're able to create content and be ready for the future of not so far away? So our quest for bringing in these partnerships, for bringing in these technologies and be ready for the change when it happens so we can actually telepresence system. If VR is going to be the next important component in the catalog, we're going to be ready to give it to you. And I think brands must be quick to run into that segment because that's going to make a big change. You know, letting your glasses and looking at a 3-D view of your washing machine in your house before you buy it, it's going to be a killer idea that is going to change the shopping experience. Akshara : [00:36:58] Absolutely. Nikita, would you like to add something to this? Nikita: [00:37:01] Yeah, I think we are might be a little while longer, I think Anand. But I think what what they're already talking about is everybody is talking about the 3 Vs, which is voice, video and vernacular. That's where I think everybody is working on currently and and it's already out and the numbers on this are looking so good. I don't know if you guys know that 60 percent of smartphone users have actually used voice assist already, you know? And four out of five people during the pandemic actually watched YouTube to learn something new, you know, and Google Translate numbers are are have seen upwards of, I think, 15x increase during the pandemic. So these three will, will will in the next five years play a big role in getting the next hundred million customers online. That's one big area, I think that technology will will play a big role. Akshara : [00:38:33] Ok, so I'm just going to I'm just going to move on to it. All right, that's great. I think that also brings us to the end of the podcast. But of course, this conversation is incomplete until we talk about how we're working with nitty-gritti as partners. So, you know, Anand and Nikita, both of you. What prompted you to work with Vue.ai And what's the vision you have for this joint partnership? Anand: [00:38:58] Well, I thought you'd never ask. Thanks for asking that right? Ok, so I think it's something that's very fundamental to textmatics, the tool does and what we do in the business is marketers, brand, heads - They all go by numbers. They have measurement for everything that they do, everything from some measuring the time it takes for the call to be terminated in the call center all the way to the money they spend on the interviews and all of that when it comes to content. Technology has a very low role to play or virtually no role to play, and that has to be some kind of a standard, a global standard that has to come in and be measurable across categories and products. That's what technology has enabled us to deliver to these brands, and that technology is more of a measuring tool. It's more of a content creation tool. But what it needed was a whole lot of added support that can come from a lot of technologies that are available in the market and a lot of organizations that have actually invested to bring in a high degree of automation and AI into the picture. And our conversation that you started because we had no intentions of reinventing the wheel and building something that was already there, the system will hurt quite a bit about you before we actually started the conversation and found it to be the perfect fit that we wanted the came to completely computer vision engineering for the images that we were working on. So in that sense, I think you sort of was almost like the design for what we wanted to do. And having got into a partnership and sort of it into a tool, I have great ambitions of changing the dynamics that we have a lot of conversations happening about how we can bring in more of these learnings to only keep sort of empowering the engine to do a lot better, a lot more faster. So I think I think we've got a great relationship going on. I'm very excited about what's in store. Akshara : [00:40:55] That's wonderful to hear from our partners. Lovely to hear that. Thank you so much Anand and Nikita, and I think this brings us to the end of the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this conversation. I know I learned a lot because I think in the middle I started getting very curious about these different aspects of how you are working with brands and convincing them that this is something that we need. Because even back at Vue.ai Here, we're always talking about how it's not really easy to convince fashion and apparel to use overnight. And it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of pilot projects. It takes consistent convincing for them to understand what the actual ROI is, but again, very similar. We're making a lot of progress and we have since twenty sixteen, so it's very exciting to see companies like this partner together to do something important and big in retail. So looking forward to the partnership. Thank you so much for doing the podcast. Anand: [00:41:57] Thanks for having us. We're probably the youngest and the newest and the smallest partner in the new ecosystem, and we feel really honoured to be on the show. Thank you so much. Nikita: [00:42:08] Thanks for inviting us.

Meet your speakers:

Nikita Bhargav

Co-founder

Anand Siva

Co-founder, Nitty Gritti

Akshara Subramanian

Director, Customer Marketing, Vue.ai

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