Vaneeta Punchvedi | 08 May, 2015
Logistics remains the Achilles heel for all Indian e-commerce players and it is a main bugbear as well. India is a huge country and courier service across it is not as fast, efficient or reliable as online shopping sector would like it to be yet, CEO & Co-Founder of DailyObjects.com, Pankaj Garg said this in a exclusive interview to SME Times.
Excerpt of the interview...
Please tell us something about your company.
Pankaj Grag: Dailyobjects.com was started in 2012 and today, it is the premier Indian website offering designer and customisable cell phone cases. We offer over 3000 designer cases for more than 100 models of smartphones and both those numbers increase every week. We also offer a number of customisable cases limited only by your imagination.
What motivated you to start DailyObjects?
Pankaj Grag: We were looking for cell phone accessories and quickly realised that cases available in India were all terrible. They have uninspiring designs, were badly made and they peeled, faded or fell apart within weeks.
We tied up with incredible artists from around the world for exclusive designs never seen in India before. We use the latest MT3 technology, to ensure our cases never fade, peel or scratch off and we offer a 30 day money-back guarantee & one year warranty.
How would you see your journey of making mobile cover from necessity to luxury?
Pankaj Grag: We realised that the Indian consumer had an appetite for high end smartphones and so we deduced that there would be a similar demand for really well made cases that would go well with flagship smartphones.
We have been quite successful in our effort to take a purely functional item like a smartphone case and make it a beautiful, desirable form of personal expression. People used to avoid putting cases on their phones because they were ugly, now our customers buy two, three or more different cases at a time because they cannot chose between designs that they like so much.
We sell premium priced smartphone cases that are positioned as luxury items. We offer the Indian buyer a huge range of exclusive designs, product quality and warranty coverage that have never been offered in this country before. Our customers realise that our products justify their admittedly high cost. Not only is our order value very high, our customers are extremely loyal as well. They come back to us to buy cases again and again.
Do you think that e-commerce market is dominating retail marketing? Your views.
Pankaj Grag: E-commerce is dominating retail marketing in India just as it is around the world. In India, e-commerce has the additional advantage of reach across a geographically diverse nation whereas most retail is limited to a very small list of cities and towns. E-commerce is also bringing the Indian customer the ability to bargain, hunt and shop comparatively like never before, something that most Indians love to do.
As the mobile boom in India puts smartphones and the internet into the hands of more and more Indians, e-commerce’s dominance over retail is only going to grow.
How Dailyobjects work? What is the USP of it?
Pankaj Grag: Our USP is Design+Quality.
Our line-up of artists is incredible and we are constantly adding new designers to theDailyObjects roster. Just this month, we have added 3 new designers and hundreds of incredibly cool pieces of artwork to our site at dailyobjects.com. Customers come back because our collection is always being updated and there are always new, interesting designs on our site. Our customers often buy two or more cases at a time and regularly comeback to keep checking out and buying from our latest offerings.
We also use the world’s best technology to print our designs and source cases that fit perfectly and are finished beautifully. You will not find a rough edge or a moulding line on a DailyObjects case. Indian consumers have great taste; these things matter to them and they are willing to pay for quality.
Making your customer satisfied is the biggest challenge how you take this challenge?
Pankaj Grag: We start by making the very best products that we know of. Dailyobjects also offers the Indian buyer something new every week. We put a lot of effort into sourcing new artwork and finding new artists from around the world. Since we are a design focussed company, we cannot afford to have our product line-up stagnate, we add hundreds of new designs to our collection each month.
The second part of customer satisfaction is support. We believe we have the best warranty in the business, a one year coverage against manufacturing defects, chipping, peeling or fading of the artwork on any Dailyobjects case. On our designer cases, we even offer a 30 day full money back guarantee. If customers are not satisfied with their Dailyobjects designer cases, they can simply return it for a full refund. We even pay for return shipping so that the customer can try our products with complete confidence.
All of this is to wow our customers every time and make them happy about shopping with dailyobjects.com
According to you what are the gridlocks in e-commerce sector?
Pankaj Grag: Logistics remains the Achilles heel for all Indian e-commerce players and it is our main bugbear as well. India is a huge country and courier service across it is not as fast, efficient or reliable as we would like it to be, yet.
The second problem is that even though smartphone adoption is exploding, internet access costs are not going down fast enough and speeds are not increasing soon enough. This is a huge bottleneck for all of Indian e-commerce and is holding back the entire Indian economy, I think.
What are your future plans?
Pankaj Grag: We are expanding! First into exciting new product categories that our customers have been asking for and then into new and emerging markets like the Middle East and South Africa. I think people are going to love our new product ranges and I’d like to reveal more but to find out, you just have to keep checking dailyobjects.com!
