Design
5 Questions with designer Masaba Gupta and Myntra Home’s Sunder Balasubramanian on saying goodbye to impulse buys!
JUL 29, 2024 | By Team ELLE DECOR India
Your home is no less than a runway. Fabrics, patterns, colours and a reflection of personal style, sound similar? However, if the convenience of online retail therapy makes you click checkout on another pair of heels that you are still looking for an occasion to wear, it might be the same with decor. How about a recommendation from Masaba Gupta? Say goodbye to your woes for Myntra has joined forces with the renowned fashion designer and beauty expert.
As the brand ambassador, she lends her signature style to curate a home decor collection that resonates with you. Myntra Home’s portfolio includes M&S Home, H&M Home, India Circus, My Trident, Urban Space, Elementary, D’Decor and Nestasia, to name a few. Here is what the CMO of Myntra, Sunder Balasubramanian and the designer Masaba herself about this new endeavour.
What is the overarching vision for the collection?
Masaba: Rather than this being a collection, it is more an idea of various mood boards, thoughts and themes coming together. As somebody who has done multiple homes and retail spaces for my brand, I think as people we are just so choked on bandwidth today. It’s very difficult to find a hundred websites where you can choose your favourites and put them together to style a home.
The idea is to help people bring all their thoughts together by way of giving them multiple mood boards or themes. If you like something more rustic or vintage-inspired, we have something for that. If you like something minimal, there’s something in that category as well. If you like your bedroom to be an artsy space with possibly lots of colour blocks, we also have that. But if you’re somebody who loves whites and beiges and browns and maybe just furniture, like it could be a rattan, it could be a jute-inspired kind of texture, we have that too. I think the idea is to give the very evolving and very dynamic Indian patron of today various options to choose from.
In this series of products for Myntra, how much of Masaba do we see in the products versus something you’ve gone out of your comfort zone to curate?
Masaba: If you even come to my home, different rooms say different things, it’s a melting pot. There’s a little bit of everything, but at the same time, I am somebody who likes to have a little touch of modern with a touch of old-school and vintage. So it’s all very different things, which is why Myntra’s idea was to cater to these, say, 10 different personalities. I think it made a lot of sense because as somebody who works on multiple things, I want to have that ease of shopping on a platform that gives me options to choose from.
The inspirations also have some really interesting names and often names evoke an imagery or a mood. What was the thought behind the names?
Sunder: I think the back story to this is what’s the role that Myntra can play for users in the country from a home perspective? When you go through our app, you will see, you know, living room versus bedroom versus balcony versus study versus pieces, versus kitchen. So that’s one way to help navigate the options. The second way is through themes because people have inspiration that comes from them.
Masaba was inspired by Bali. Someone else could be inspired by a trip. When they go to rural India, someone could be inspired by a sense of minimalism. So the idea is to help people navigate through themes. And a little sprinkle that will always come in, whether it’s fashion or whether it’s home, is a little bit of what’s trending at this point in time.
You spoke about changing demographics and how the user today is better travelled and more informed. Could you elaborate on that?
Sunder: Trends will obviously follow a lot of what happens outside. So, right now we’re just almost post-summer. A lot of inspiration is from summer, whether it’s from a travel perspective or otherwise. And we’ll keep seeing that evolve, right? Once festive comes in, again it will have a different vibe. So you will see these evolving as the external environment around you evolves. Earlier people would just look at an external source of inspiration. Now they want to curate how they look and feel. Their involvement in homes now is much deeper.
What are some challenges that you perhaps foresee in the coming future?
Sunder: More than challenges, I think I see it as what are the different opportunities that we can cater to and how do you in a timely fashion respond to those? The choices for an individual range from being from international sources to Indian ethnic sources. How do you ease that sense of navigation for the consumer itself? We have 60 million monthly active users who keep coming to our platform. So for them, how exactly how we’ve helped them do it on fashion and beauty, we want to do that from a home perspective. And with Masaba, we have a little bit of an expert to help us get there.
With the Curated by Masaba collection showcasing carefully chosen products and brands, Myntra is set to transform your space into fabulous and fashionable homes. Themes like the Cozy Bedroom selection featuring ceramic diffusers, minimalist lamps and neutral furnishing options and the Lovely Living Room’s tropical cushions, ceramic planters, textured ottomans and woven hangings, shopping for your space has never been this easy. The only thing left to do is add to cart!
