Daybreak - Who wants instant fashion more? You or Myntra and Ajio?

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Instant fashion is everywhere now. Open Myntra or Ajio and you will see the option to get clothes delivered in minutes. But who is this really for? Are shoppers truly demanding 30 minute outfits?In this episode, we dive into what is driving the push for instant fashion, how it works behind the scenes, and why it has become such a high stakes bet for India’s biggest fashion apps.Take this survey to share your best prompt.  Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Vidhati, the co-host of 90,000 hours. I'm interrupting this recording to tell you all about our latest episode. Over the last few months, every conversation I had with people in the 21 to 25-year-old age group circle back to one thing. Anxiety about work. There's a general sense of dread in the air, only compounded by the constant noise about automation and AI taking away entry-level jobs. We are calling the hope gap.

It's our name for the feeling when your expectations do not match reality. And when there are no incentives, an ambition, it goes for a toss. We explore this hope gap where it's most visible today, IT services. We also attempt to see if there's a fix. We learned a ton while reporting the story and would love to hear your thoughts. The episode will be linked in the show notes. With that, let's get back. There's a weird shift happening in Indian fashion right now.

And no, it's not about hemlines or colour palettes or whatever Instagram has decided is the aesthetic this week. It is about something that may be a little boring but far more powerful. Delivery time. Over the last year or so, Mintra has been quietly turning a backend function into the front of house. Its rapid commerce arm M now promises delivery in 30 minutes to two hours. across select parts of Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune. Now, it's been exactly a year since it was launched and MNow already has 80 plus dark stores, covers 940 pin codes and drives 10% of all orders in the areas where it operates.

It's hit 20% customer penetration and clocked 35 million unique visitors in its first year. In June 2025, Mintra said that Mnows' daily orders had nearly doubled in the last quarter with fashion outpacing every other vertical. Most of us think that this is maybe a kind of delightful add-on or a flashy convenience feature, or even worse, a grocery-style quick-commerce imitation which is dressed up for fashion. But what if I tell you that instinct is wrong? What if instant delivery is not about impatient consumers at all? What if it is about the last meaningful moat that is left in Indian online fashion? Because design can be copied. Brand stories get flattened into feeds.

Influencer marketing is a treadmill only of you can afford. And discovery is dictated by algorithms. And discounts, they drain margins faster than they drive loyalty. But logistics, speed, hyperloyalty. local stocking, demand prediction, those are hard. Those take capital. Those are extremely difficult to copy. So today, we are asking a deceptively simple question. Is quick fashion really about people wanting things fast? Or is there something else happening behind the scenes? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nagda Sharma, and I don't

chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargis and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 25th of November. If you rewind a decade or so, fashion brands still had breeding room. They could differentiate on cuts, fabrics, silhouettes, seasonal drops, or even store experience. Scarcity was baked into the system. If you wanted a particular look, you went to a particular brand. Online fashion flattened all of this.

Most Indian apparel brands now source from overlapping clusters like Tirupur, Noida and Gujarat. And anything that sells well gets copied very quickly. A shirt trending on one platform will appear across multiple catalogs in weeks, sometimes even days. And that is just how fast-moving manufacturing works. Then came the customer acquisition crunch. Paid marketing on meta and Google became brutally expensive. Influencer content turned into bad. background noise. So unless you were spending heavily, your message was barely cutting through.

And even if you do spend, you still have to confront the marketplaces. Type black dress on Mintra or Adio. You will see thousands of nearly identical images. So discovery is no longer controlled by brand loyalty or store footfall. It is controlled by an algorithmic feat. A 2025 report by Bain and Company and Flipcott captured this shift. India's next phase of e-retail will be dominated by quick commerce, trend first commerce and hyper-value commerce. Trend-first fashion alone is projected to grow four times to almost $10 billion by 2028 with more than half online. And layered on top of all this is India's discount culture, monthly mega sales, endless festivals, perpetual offers that permanently erode margins. So if design is copied, marketing is unaffordable, discovery is algorithm controlled and margins are squeezed, what exactly is a fashion platform supposed to compete on?

This is where M now enters the frame. Stay tuned for more on this, but before that, Rachel has a quick message for you. I'm pausing this episode to ask you a very quick question. What's your best AI prompt? One you're actually kind of proud of. It saves you time and it does exactly what you needed to do. Why do we ask? Well, let's be honest.

There's a learning curve with AI and most of us are still figuring it out. So, we are running a short survey to ask you to share your tried and tested hacks. You share your prompt, you get a chance to be featured in one of our episodes and you get to hear from others like you. All the productive, efficient folks out there who are making AI work for them. The link is in the show notes. It will take you just five minutes. We can't wait to hear from you. Now, back to the episode.

Here is the simple logic. If everything else looks the same, the only thing that matters is how fast I can get it. And Mintra is trying to turn that into strategy. From the outside, M now might look like just another delivery option. But operationally, it is an entirely separate network. Company disclosures and reporting revealed that M now runs on 80 plus dark stores, covers six major metros and delivers in half an hour to two hours. And that

is an impossibly fast time frame for traditional e-commerce warehouses. Now, the setup requires more than just great career partners. It needs high order density within each microzone, hyperlocal inventory decisions, dark store teams that can pick up and pack in minutes, and fleets optimized for multiple short hops. And that is not something that a young D2C brand can replicate quickly. And it's happening alongside a broader shift actually. The Bain Flipkart report notes that QuickCommerce now accounts for 10% of all e-retail spending and its forecast is to grow 40% plus annually by 2030. And beyond that is rapid commerce, the four to six-hour delivery layer that is projected to become a $20 billion dollar GMV market with a $2 billion logistics opportunity by 2030.

Fashion fits perfectly in this window, higher margins than grocery, more urgent use cases than electronics, and zero perishability. And Mintra is not the only one reading the playbook. In July 2025, Reliance Retail launched Argyo Rush, a four-hour fashion delivery service across six cities offering over one-lack styles with what Reliance calls

promising unit economics, driven by higher order values and lower return rates. So what is really going on? A t-shirt can be copied, a logo can be copied, a design can be cloned by the weekend, but an 80 dark store network with city-level demand prediction, or a six-city four-hour service with positive unit economics? That is far harder to duplicate. Speed stops being a feature, it becomes a moat, capital-intensive, operationally complex and geographically path-dependent.

And once a shopper experiences, I ordered at 6.30 and I wore it at 8, everything else feels slow. But moats only matter if they hold. So, will this model last? Stay tuned to find out. To understand whether instant fashion is sustainable, it helps to look sideways at quick commerce. The Bain Flipkart report shows that over two-thirds of e-grocery orders,

and 10% of e-retail spending now come via quick commerce. Reuters noted that the sector has grown $6 to $7 billion since 2022 and is expected to grow 40% annually by 2030. But the same report also includes warnings. Analysts say that the boom could be short-lived and difficult to sustain profitably, especially outside metros. Now, translate that to fashion and four questions emerge. One is cost. Running 80 to 100 dark stores is not cheap. Half an hour to two hours is a logistical promise that burns money.

Two is geography. M Now and AGO Rush are metro-centric. Move into Tier 2 or Tier 3 and the economics unravel. Number three is returns. Fashion returns are notoriously high. Early RGO data suggests that lower return rates for rush orders were because they are urgent. purchases, but the jury is still out. Number four is competition. Mintra, AGO, Nica's Naika now, and startups like Slick, New Me and Not all promise some version of instant fashion. So why might instant fashion still be the least bad strategy? Because speed creates habit.

If M Now or Ajiro rush become your default for last minute outfits, they're not just selling clothes, they are selling certainty. and certainty is sticky. In a world where every other moat has collapsed, speed may be the only defensible one left. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings

and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Snitha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.