When a baby is born in the maternity wards of one of the 300-odd hospitals in Pune and lets out its first cry, it is not just the parents, family members, friends and hospital staff exulting. A Web portal has been awaiting the birth of the baby with equal anticipation ? and gratitude, by reaching out to the tiny one with a gift hamper?as it goes about its daily business.
Catching them young, really young, seems to be the mantra, and Supam Maheshwari, founder and CEO of Firstcry.com and a serial entrepreneur, seems to have made a habit out of it. After running a successful online baby and kids products store for about three-and-a-half years, Maheshwari has now come out with the unique concept of reaching out to his potential customers, a la parents and children, through the gift hampers.
Maheshwari has created a dedicated team for the purpose. While it started as a pilot project in Pune, the concept has now gone to 25 cities and 6,000 hospitals. He has already gifted 1.5 lakh babies. The ‘Firstcry Box’ comes in a well-packaged gift hamper with products worth R700 to R1,000 and a minimalist branding design. The gift hamper consists of a host of baby products that the little ones will he using from diapers, to creams, to lotions, oil and breast pumps. All this at absolutely zero cost.
For Firstcry.com, this is a way of reaching its target audience with a nice gesture. The gift hamper is loaded with products that has come courtesy baby care product companies, which are more than happy to put in their samples for the right audience, says Maheshwari.
?The cost of the box gets shared and over time, as they reach scale, the costs will come down further. Companies have signed multi-year agreements with us as they find this a higher RoI activity,? says Maheshwari.
But it?s not been a cakewalk for Firstcry.com to distribute these gift hampers. A lot of hard work goes into ensuring that relationships are built with hospitals, the gift is shipped in time and then finally gifted at the right time. The data has been painstakingly built and relationship created, which is better than big spends on promoting the portal.
A dedicated customer relationship management (CRM), distribution and logistics team has been set up to service this channel. ?It is helping us reach 55,000 parents every month and there is more than 10% conversion, which spells out to about 5,500 customers,? explains Maheshwari. This is working out to be a unique differentiation. ?Nobody can come and build it easily,? he says.
For Maheshwari, an IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus, these concepts give his portal an edge over others. This is his second venture. He made a successful exit in the earlier e-learning venture, Brainvisa Technologies. Maheshwari founded Firstcry with Amitava Sinha, who was sales and business operations head at Brainvisa and is now co-founder of the online retailer.
There are only a few handful of stores in each city devoted to baby products and there is a clear gap available, which Maheshwari seeks to fill. He stacks up 70,000 items and offer 600 brands from India and abroad and has 350 vendors for his on-line retail store. Brands such as Mattel, Ben10, Pigeon, Funskool, Hotwheels, Nuby, Farlin, Medela, Pampers, Disney, Barbie, Gerber, Libero, Fisher Price and Mee Mee are some of the known names that Firstcry deals in.