House of Anita Dongre unified commerce on Salesforce — online sales grew 3x (interview)
In an ET CIO brand-solution interview, HOAD CEO Kavindra Mishra says one Salesforce front-end now runs its sites, stores and PoS, lifting online sales 3x.
What was changed
In an ET CIO brand-solution interview — a Salesforce-sponsored feature — House of Anita Dongre CEO Kavindra Mishra describes how the fashion house founded in 1995 — now 260 exclusive brand stores, 745 multi-brand stores across India, under labels including AND and Global Desi — broke down the wall between online and offline. Before the pandemic, he says, e-commerce and stores ran in silos on separate customer databases, the website kept suffering downtime, and the old CRM worked only as an earn-and-burn loyalty tool that could not segment customers or run targeted campaigns.
COVID-19 pushed the company onto Salesforce as a single front-end: Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Einstein and Tableau now sit behind the website, order management, CRM, point-of-sale and customer service, so a customer is the same person online and in-store. Mishra says about 85% of HOAD's sales come from offline customers who previously could only be reached by SMS; the merged data now lets teams reach them with 1-to-1 digital ads, WhatsApp campaigns and lifecycle triggers such as loyalty-point expiry reminders, which he says significantly lifted redemption rates.
He reports that targeted SMS campaigns lifted average transaction value by 38% versus offline ATVs, contributed 8% of online sales and converted at 0.5% together with email; CRM campaigns now contribute about 25% of sales; cross-brand visibility — finally knowing an AND customer is also a Global Desi customer — improved wallet share; and the reworked Commerce Cloud sites minimized downtime and helped lift online sales 3x, with click-and-collect feeding store traffic. Every figure is self-reported in a vendor-placed feature, so they are the company's own claims rather than audited results.
Why it worked
The case is documented only in a Salesforce-sponsored brand-solution feature; all numbers come from the CEO being interviewed, not from filings or third parties.
It shows the precondition of omnichannel retail in fashion: without unified customer identity across PoS and e-commerce, 85% of the customer base is unreachable digitally.
The levers that moved numbers were unglamorous hygiene — ending website downtime, automating installment payment links, sending expiry reminders — not creative spend.
It illustrates why legacy CRM earns its bad name: an earn-and-burn points tool actively prevented segmentation and targeting.
What can be applied
Unifying customer data before personalizing it pays: once online and offline identities sat in one system, segment-level targeting beat mass blasts on every metric HOAD reported.
Aftermath
The feature was published on October 31, 2022. Mishra said HOAD was aiming to take omnichannel retailing further: integrating Social Studio with Social Customer Service so agents could resolve issues straight from social feeds, and pushing conversions among existing customers. He noted customers still want to touch and feel outfits in stores — what changed is that they discover and engage digitally first. No third-party verification of the reported figures has been published.