FirstCry- An idea turned into a Business Opportunity

FirstCry is Asia’s largest online portal for baby and kids products. They comprise of over 2 Lakh+ baby and kids items from 2000+ top International and Indian brands like Ben10, Pigeon, Funskool, Hotwheels, Pampers, Disney, and so on. FirstCry is a Pune-based company which was started in 2010. FirstCry is operated by BrainBees solutions. Supam Maheshwari is an IIM A pass out and an engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and CEO and founder of the biggest baby product marketplace FirstCry in India. FirstCry is an eCommerce Company offering a wide range of baby care products and toys.

Prior to launching FirstCry, Supam was the co-founder and CEO of Brainvisa Technologies which was the e-learning company focused on helping businesses to increase the learning and training effectiveness to accomplish business objectives. In less than 8 years, Supan made Brainvisa one of the largest e-learning solutions providers globally. But in the year 2007, he took a decision to trade off the company to Indecomm Global services for $25 million.

Before quitting Brianvisa, Supam used to travel abroad a lot to the US and Europe. And he used to bring a lot of baby products and toys for his daughter as the quality of products abroad were considered better than local markets. He eventually realized that there is a huge demand-supply gap in the domestic market for kids-focused brands. Kids industry in India had an approx. turnover of about Rs 50,000 crore and 95% of these sales were offline.

Hence, the idea was forming in his mind to create a platform which could provide access to quality baby and kids products globally. Supam and his friend Amitava Saha put together some funds from their personal resources and launched FirstCry.com in 2010.

Supam Maheshwari’s business strategy and vision led the company FirstCry to achieve great heights. He focused on one of the most significant competitive features of a company that is giving personalized attention to the customers. Apart from this FirstCry also gave an opportunity to the local retailers to sell their products on its platform. Firstcry.com has an inventory of more than 90,000 items on its online platform. Apart from the online presence, it had an inventory of around 15,000 to 20,000 products in the offline stores.

FirstCry was able to raise a total of $119 million in funding in over 6 rounds. The company also acquiredMahindra’ss baby product venture Babyoye. The company has been expanding through offline mode also and plans to open more than 400 stores soon.

Mahindra Retail and FirstCry have consolidated their operations, with Mahindra Retail selling its franchise business to FirstCry and operating all company stores under a FirstCry master franchise agreement. The merged entity will conduct its business under the brand name FirstCry.com- A FirstCry Mahindra Venture. FirstCry has further tightened its grip, but organizing the unorganized $12 billion industry remains a massive task ahead. Over time, they plan to change the way, Indian parents buy, so that they can be at home to spend more quality time with their kids and family.