FirstCry.

com, an online and offline brand providing range of products for babies, kids and moms,
was born in 2010 out of a desire to solve Indian parents' problem of not having access to the best
brands and products for their babies and kids. In 4 years, FirstCry.com has emerged as the clear
leader in its niche. The e-commerce company was founded by Supam Maheshwari and Amitava
Saha in 2010. Being Asia's largest online portal for baby and kids products, FirstCry.com has an
inventory of more than 70,000 items from over 700 top International and Indian brands like Mattel,
Ben10, Pigeon, Funskool, Hotwheels, Nuby, Farlin, Medela, Pampers, Disney, Barbie, Gerber,
Fisher Price, Mee Mee, etc. With more than 700 global and national vendors on board, FirstCry is
promising a excellent customer experience, an incredible range of baby care products and the most
sensible prices. All products come from FirstCry warehouse and were obtained from approved
officials or producers. FirstCry.com has the highest number of Stock Keeping Units (SKU's)
offering the biggest product variety. From maternity wear to nursery accessories, diapers,
children's clothes up to the age of 9, toys, school equipment, prams, vehicle seats, etc. FirstCry.com
is like a megastore for parents.

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Supam Maheshwari, a passing IIM-A and Delhi College of Engineering technician put Firstcry's
creative concept onto the platform. He was the first in his family to take up the challenge of
entering entrepreneurship with Brainvisa's launch, but Firstcry was more of a pain-point that he
faced during his first kid personally. Firstcry has become the biggest online portal today

While at Firstcry, Supam is leading the display by developing and implementing the long and
short-term plans of the company with their approach in mind. Supam will always be seen as the
first to initiate something, a true leader at heart, and would not shy away from guiding or directing
the team to reach goals.

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Unlike most entrepreneurs who chose to work in the first days and then migrate to
entrepreneurship, Supam jumped straight into the battle of entrepreneurship.
He started working on a project soon after completing his post graduation from IIM and initiated
the same project in 2000. The project was none other than Brainvisa Technologies, which
essentially dealt with end-to-end teaching alternatives and instructional design.

Brainvisa was nothing but an e-learning company that concentrated on assisting companies around
the globe boost the efficiency of learning and training by developing tailored teaching solutions
that again concentrated on setting and defining business goals.

Over a span of less than 8 years, Supam has grown Brainvisa to become one of the world's biggest
suppliers of e-learning alternatives, and has also expanded his first child to offices in the US,
Europe, and Australia, along with two development facilities in India. They now had a powerful
development team of 500 staff as well as a key team of specialists in the fields of logistics,
aerospace, pharmaceutical, telecom, vertical computing, etc.

Just as Brainvisa's development was incredible, this period ended in 2007 when he chose to trade
off the business to an Indecomm Global service group based in the United States.

Started

Now during his days with Brainvisa, Supam had become a father and his work required him to
travel a lot to the U.S. and Europe. So he used to bring back a lot of products for his newly born
daughter as the quality of products available abroad was much trusted than available in local
markets.

Now when he moved out of Brainvisa, he began searching for products for his daughter and
couldn't find the ones that he looked for. That is when he realized that, there was a huge demand-
supply gap in the domestic market for kids-focused brands.

So all this moved in Supam's mind and hence the concept of what the next stage for him was
supposed to be had become very apparent now. He wanted to build a platform that could give
parents worldwide simple access to quality baby and children's goods. He wanted to bridge the
divide with his model for the Indian parents.

Once all things were idealized, Supam collected some funds from their private assets with his
colleague Amitava Sah and with seed capital of INR2.5 Cr started BrainBees solutions under
whose wings, Firstcry.com was introduced in 2010.

Supam Maheshwari claims, "Firstcry.com has an internet platform inventory of over 90,000
products. Approximately 15 inventories exist.

BUSINESS MODEL

Firstcry.com works on a hybrid business model. So, apart from the online presence, Firstcry.com
also has over 100 franchise stores across India. Firstcry runs a unique programme wherein the
brand reaches over 70,000 unique parents each month by giving out a Firstcry Box.

VISION AND FUTURE GOALS

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
2020. 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.

In terms of category, the platform is witnessing a jet in the demand for clothes and shoes in the
baby and kids fashion space. The biggest marketing challenge for Firstcry is to reach parents in
the most targeted and cost-efficient manner, which it claims to have achieved through the Firstcry
Box program.
CHALLENGES

1.It caters to niche segment which is yet to develop fully in India

2. 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.

3. Company is growing and having investment from SoftBank but the increments are really
marginal which is the main reason employee leave as soon as they see better package even though
knowing that the FirstCry has environment for growing.

4. While every other eCommerce portals in India is offering discounts, free-shipping, cash-on-
delivery and free return pickup to lure maximum customers aiming to create a long-term
relationship, FirstCry has taken a completely different approach where they do false advertising
marketing coupon-codes offering discounts but adds or increases shipping-charges magically as
soon as one applies them (discount-codes) as shown below. I am not sure what to call this
malpractice, but this "coupon fraud" wastes users time where they are surprised by shipping-
charges at the last moment of checkout as soon as they use the discount-code which was used to
lure them into shopping.