CHENNAI: For Amazon Fashion, more than 50% of its demand comes not from the buzzing metros, but from tier-2 cities surprisingly, according to Mayank Shivam, category leader at Amazon Fashions, India. Shivam was speaking to ET on his one-day visit to Chennai. “We see a lot of demand from tier-2 cities for premium products at higher price points which are not accessible to them and this demand is growing. The sellers don’t have a physical presence there, so the customers depend on e-commerce to get those brands,” he said. The e-commerce giant’s fashion category which was launched in India in September 2013 with watches and fashion jewellery has since then seen a huge growth and is now one among the top-3 categories with 5000-plus brands. “There’s been a lot of investment in helping customers find the right product…And along with that we are also investing a lot in the editorial…which is about fashion stories,” said Shivam. Investments are also being made in imaging studios, video stories and category stores. “Helping customers go deeper into a category, giving them more choice, that’s the kind of investment we do. For us fashion is not about a few customers, every Indian has a sense of fashion which is unique to them…And we are the fashion store which wants to give them what they are looking for,” he noted. Speaking on the sixth Amazon Couture Week just launched in New Delhi he observed that ‘each of such weeks is about making fashion more and more accessible to people.’ “The idea again is investment in fashion industry in India, where we work with designers and they interpret the global fashion for Indians and then we pick that up and then we have this fashion team which takes this and translates it for making it more accessible to a wider set of customers,” he said. The Indian customer too seems to be evolving with trends like fall fashion, winter fashion, which were till date predominantly a western phenomenon, entering the Indian fashion scene. “The customers are looking at fashion very closely and are following seasonal trends. Even if the weather doesn’t permit they still try out some of the seasonal trends,” noted Shivam pointing out at the jump in sales of products like boots, jackets etc even in markets that do not experience winter. While Chennai has continued to shy away from such seasonal trends, it has been one of the top cities to contribute to the huge success story of Amazon’s ethnic wears. “Chennai is among the top six cities for us, the Amazon fashions. Ethnic wear and designer wear gets a lot of demand compared to other cities,” he said. And within the category Sari continues to be the favorite. “Within ethnic wears almost 40% of the traffic goes to saris..It is also a very interesting category because it’s a heavily browsed category and what we mean by browsed is that the customer spends a lot of time looking at it..spending a lot of time for choosing the sari they want to buy. So that also gives us the responsibility to work with sellers to get the range of saris that fill this appetite,” Shivam noted.