Prepared

By:
Group 11(IB-B)
Ronak Patel- 16020241120 Axay Devlekar- 16020241095
Harsh Vora- 16020241095 Shubham Singh- 16020241129
Raghav Gupta: 16020241116

Vision:
Its benchmark is to provide their customers with a physical stores shopping experience; online,
without the hassles of driving around the town locating a shop and then a place to park the vehicle.
Our sourcing team works with over 150 vendors internationally, nationally to source the best
products/brands for you at the most affordable price.

Mission:
Its mission is to provide best of the products/brands at the lowest prices with great online shopping
experience, free shipping and Prompt customer service.

About Founder:
• Supam Maheshwari, an IIM-A pass out and engineer from Delhi College of Engineering put the
innovative idea of Firstcry onto the platform. He was the first one in his family to take the
challenge to get into entrepreneurship with the launch of Brainvisa, but Firstcry was more of
a pain-point that he was facing personally during his first child. Today Firstcry has gone on to
become the largest online shopping portal for kids and expecting moms not only in India but
also in Asia.
• While at Firstcry, Supam leads the show by designing and executing the company’s long and
short term plans keeping in mind their strategy. A true leader at heart, Supam will always be
seen as the first one to initiate something, and would also not shy away from guiding or
directing the team to achieve targets.

Future Plan:
• The company has been dynamically expanding its reachability through offline mode also. Till
now the company has already crossed 120 brick and mortar stores and has plans to open 400
stores by 2017. The company aims to be the single leader in the market for baby products in
India. If you want to order for your baby’s products, Firstcry.com has to be ‘the ultimate
destination’. Atpresent, the company is distributing more than 60,000 Firstcry Hospital Boxes
a month and plans to take this up to 75,000 in the next three months and then scale it up to
one lakh by the end of this financial year.

STP
Parents of young children who prefer online medium of
Segment shopping
Target Group Middle income, young parents who are online shoppers
Wide range of products covering different aspects of baby’s
Positioning needs.

SWOT Analysis:

Strength:
• 1,000,000 plus customer base and one of Asia's Largest Online Portal for Baby and Kids
Products
• 2.90,000 plus products from 1,200 plus brands.
• Collaboration with brands like Funskool, Farlin, Mattel, Pampers, Disney etc.
• Four rounds of fund raising from investors like Saif Partners, Valiant Capital Partner, IDG
Ventures India etc.
• 5.Increased sales and brand visibility by venturing into offline mode of sale through its 100
stores in 85 cities. These are franchised stores.
• 6. Subscription services offered by it is a good customer retention strategy.
• 7. Concepts like “gift boxes” which it delivers to new mothers in collaboration with hospitals
help in customer acquisition. It has delivered 6,00,000 plus firstcry boxes till date.

Weakness:
• It caters to niche segment which is yet to develop fully in India
• Too much reliance on word of mouth publicity can be a drawback in a scenario when
ecommerce giants like flipkart and Amazon have aggressive marketing campaigns.
• Ensuring timely delivery is not easy
• No single courier company could cover the entire country.
• Unwillingness of credit card holders to divulge their personal information over the Internet
made COD the preferred payment form
• COD extended the cash cycle since courier companies would often hold payments for as long
as two weeks, forcing sellers to restock before receiving payment for their products.
• Courier companies often charged as much as 3% for this service

Opportunity:
• Expansion to other countries
• Diversification to include home décor products. Sports products etc.
• Strong focus on. its private label business called Babyhug can be very promising

Threat:
• faced tough competition from BabyOye.com in its efforts to corner India’s lucrative online
baby care products market.Hopscotch.in, Babybuzzle.com and Mybabycart.com were the
other contenders. Babybox.in, Toonz.in, Precared.com, Mahindra Retail’s Mom & Me, and the
UK’s Mother care.
• Flipkart, Amazon India, SnapDeal, and other generic online retailers were also angling to
capture their share of the attractive market.
• BabyOye used both an inventory storage model and a just-in-time arrangement with
distribution partners [16] to make online sales targeting babies, children (up to 8 years), and
expectant and new mothers.
• Hopscotch relied primarily on online flash sales of international baby and children’s brands as
its major business strategy.
• Mybabycart worked closely with mothers to sell them baby care products in a hassle-free
online marketplace, providing them with full support from data entry through customer
service and order fulfilment.
• Founded in 2007 as an online bookstore, Flipkart had come a long way to emerge as India’s
leading e-commerce marketplace, selling 30 million products in more than 70 categories.

Business Models:

Clicks & bricks/O2O/Omni Franchise model

Channel Retailing • The franchise stores, which offered a
wide range of products and facilitated
• Realizing that consumers wanted a last-mile delivery, were carefully
combination of online and offline screened and selected by an in-house
shopping company opted this model. team.
• With a focus on Tier-II and Tier-III • The team then helped to set up the stores
towns. This helped to overcome fears so franchisees could run them smoothly
about on-line shopping and to make with the goal of breaking even within a
sales in small towns – through the month or two and generating a return on
website and in stores, which account investment (ROI) within 18–24 months
for almost half of the company’s • Franchisees were assisted with
revenues. everything from store layout and design
to inventory selection, systems, point-of-
sale (POS) software, and staff training.
Stores ranged from 1,000 to 2,000 square
feet, with a franchisee investment of
about Rs. 3,000 (about US $47) per square
foot.

kiosks:
• FirstCry.com installed kiosks in its stores to enable customers to browse its wide selection.
Using 32-inch touch screens, they could view the more than 90,000 products from 1,200
brands in 20 categories that were posted on its website. Customers could then choose to
order online or have their order delivered to a store in two or three days . The kiosks increased
conversion by 10%, and by the end of 2014 they had become an integral part of all new stores
opening across the country.



Promotions:

Happiest cry ever:
• Celebrating the happiest cry ever,” through which a FirstCry box was delivered to new mothers
at hospitals across the country.
• The campaign aimed to make parents aware of the available brands and products.
• The company also entered into an agreement with Max Life Insurance to inform young parents
about life insurance.

Mommy knows best:

• The goal was to build strong brand differentiation based on the idea that babies are
demanding and mommies always know what is best for them.
• In the ad, a large office bell was rung by babies to signal their demands. The company’s claim
that, with over 70,000 products, FirstCry.com was Asia’s largest online baby and children’s
store was used simultaneously in the ad and on its website, Facebook page, and Twitter
account.
• In particular, it was highlighted in the “FC Diaries” blog in the “SOS Mom” section of its website
to stimulate conversations among mothers in a forum where they could offer advice and
support to each other.
• Rather than using social media to directly promote sales, FirstCry used them to create content
and generate conversations that enabled people to share in the parenting experience.
• The biggest marketing challenge for FirstCry was to reach parents in the most cost- effective
way and establish a presence in all cities with a minimum population of 1 million or with a
good economic rating; it planned to have a presence in about fifty cities by the end of 2014

Problem Statement:
• Around dozen domestic competitors are there against Firstcry.com. The industry is valued at
$26.2billion by 2017 and $31billion by 2019. Out of which Firstcry has market-share of
around $6.56billion, which is around 25%.
• Rural market is not that acquainted with the online retailing and online payment. So to tap
that market they need to come up with offline marketing and pricing strategies.
• Apart from that many unorganised sectors are also competing against them. In addition to
these problems, Indian logistics services are not that efficient to cater this large market. To
differentiate themselves, they need to come up with fast and efficient delivery and also with
new product lines. So in larger context, company need to focus on its logistics as well as
offline stores to reach out to the target target customers.