Pune’s FirstCry – Baby Products eCommerce Company – to have 100 offline stores

VCCircle has an interesting interview with Supam Maheshwari, CEO of Pune-based baby-products ecommerce company, FirstCry, where he says that they will have 100 offline stores in India by the end of this year

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

You raised $15 million funding from Vertex to take the total external funding to $33 million. How are you using the fresh capital?

The capital is being used mainly to enhance our technology, product and operations. A portion of the money is also being used to open more offline stores in cities across the country. We currently run 70 stores across 58 cities and continue to add four-five stores a month. We will now look to open more stores in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Delhi, among others.

By the end of this year, we will have 100 offline stores across the country to beat lifestyle apparels and fashion e-tailer Myntra.com to have the most number of stores from an e-com player in India. By the end of 2017, we aim to have 400 stores across 250 cities.

And:

Are you looking at global markets?

Currently, we are focusing on India. There are millions of babies born every day in India, and their parents plan what products to be bought for their kids even before they are born. This is where we are seeing huge opportunities. Additionally, India is a very complex world, with different states, taxes and varied tastes. Once we become even more sizeable, we will look at overseas markets.

and:

Large e-com players like Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal are innovating on last-mile delivery to acquire more businesses. How are you positioned on that front?

In fact, we do next-day delivery in 10-12 cities free of cost while Amazon and Snapdeal charge a fee for the same. This service is available in certain cities like Mumbai, Pune, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. We will pan to expand next-day delivery to 12 cities.

Read the full article. Try this Google search for other PuneTech coverage of FirstCry.

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