Behind Masoom Minawala’s success story

 The content creator is at Milan Fashion Week right now — just one of the pit stops on a journey that’s betting on cultivating human connections instead of merely ‘influencing’

The influencer is dead. At 29, and just over a decade into her career that began with a fashion blog in 2011, nobody knows it better than Masoom Minawala. Dividing her time between Mumbai and Antwerp, vignettes of Minawala’s charmed life have attracted a followership of over 1.2 million on Instagram, her online presence now managed by a team of 15 full-time employees that handle everything from the content creator’s wardrobe to business development, collaborations to captions.

Behind the scenes, there is a brain that has been just one crucial step ahead of the next big thing. This week, as her #MasoomTakesFashionWeek unfolds on Instagram, she is bringing an experience (at Milan Fashion Week) — one that took me years to achieve through my work as a fashion journalist — to people who will never have to work a fraction as hard as I. In essence, Minawala’s work is translating her access into an open invitation for her followers.

A couple of years ago, an idea of democratising fashion was floated simultaneously by many leading brands. Back then, in real terms, it meant making more accessible lines available to a larger and more diverse consumer base. Designers and brands did that to some degree of success. But on the internet, it was creators like Masoom that brought about a far greater leap. “I see myself as an entrepreneur. I’m a businessperson, I run a start-up, and I have a team. And my product is content,” she tells The Hindu Weekend.

To bring her content to the people who follow her, Minawala relies on vast repositories of data. “My analytics tells me what people are engaging with, so it shows me what they want,” she says. But on the flip side, she adds that “it also shows me that people actually don’t know what they want. So it has taken me a long time to figure out what my own relevance is…” This is a larger question in itself. Why do we need content creators when we all can access almost the exact same information?

For her, the answer — one of many — lies in becoming a link between India and the global fashion industry. “This is the point of my virtual series: to take people with me to fashion week,” says Minawal, who will be taking her viewers to shows, events, and backstage, while also organising contests and giveaways. “The reality is that a majority of my followers may never make it here, and many may simply not even want to. So, the content I make is for them.” Besides, it is good to finally see Indians representing the country on front rows routinely populated by mostly European, Eastern Asian, and Chinese creators.

Minawala feels that the content creator universe in India is far less populated than it should be. “A big brand doing a multi-collaboration campaign in the West is an investment of close to half a million Euro,” she shares. “Whereas in India, a fashion label can work with a combination of micro, mid-level, and bigger names to reach different demographics.” Because of the number of creators available for collaboration, paid partnerships can begin with as little as ₹10,000 and go up to a couple of lakhs of rupees per Instagram post or reel. (While Minawala didn’t want to comment, she resides in the upper echelons of Indian content creators in the fashion space and, according to industry sources, can charge upwards of ₹3-₹5 lakh per post. This could make her the biggest name in the field.)

“This is a great strength, and there is no other country in the world that has this, apart from China,” she says. Apparently, it is only in these two countries that Instagram assigns specific points of contact — personal relationship managers of sorts — to creators who reach a certain quantum of followers in an effort to support them and supply them with information and analytics on what’s trending. A helpful gesture and, at the very least, a smart, shrewd investment, too.