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Tag: Pepperfry

  • The new campaign is based on the insight that customers often post-pone purchasing big ticket furniture items to annual events like Diwali

    Pepperfry readies customers for its festive bonanza

    By A Correspondent

     

    Pepperfry.com has launched a new marketing campaign based on the premise of “don’t wait for Diwali”. With this campaign Pepperfry is informing customers that there is always great value available on Pepperfry.com and customers need not postpone their big-ticket furniture purchases to annual events like the Diwali festive shopping season.

     

    The new campaign is based on the insight that customers often post-pone purchasing big ticket furniture items to annual events like Diwali. Data supports this insight, typically almost a quarter of the annual sales in this category, at an industry level, happens in the festive season. The reason that consumers post-pone and concentrate their purchases in this manner is due to a perception that manufacturers and retails offer more value during these periods. But this does not hold true for Pepperfry, which has the ability to and does deliver great value through the year.

     

    The campaign addresses this consumer perception head-on and presents the Pepperfry always available value proposition as the solution. The campaign comprises two creative executions which will be aired across television channels, multiplexes and digital media. The total outlay for the month long campaign is Rs 10 crore.

     

    The films have been conceptualized by Land Kenneth Saatchi and Saatchi that convey the message using real-life situations that consumers’ face to persuade them to act now instead of waiting to buy things they really need.

     

    Talking about the TVC, Debarjyo Nandi, Senior Vice-President, Law and Kenneth Saatchi and Saatchi said, “We are looking to recreate the success of last year’s ‘Why wait for Diwali’ campaign which resulted in sustaining sales in the pre-Diwali lean period. With the euphoria around Diwali offers the larger population tends to postpone their shopping till Diwali with the hope of getting a better deal, even on things they really need and need them now. We hope to shift behaviour with Pepperfry’s all-year round value proposition.”

     

    Commenting on the new campaign Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO, Pepperfry, said, “Through our experience we have observed that furniture purchases are similar to shopping for consumer durables where a sizeable amount of sale concentrated around Diwali season. We did a campaign last year at around the same time that had the same concept – of not putting off furniture purchases till Diwali – with a very different treatment. By re-iterating the same concept again this year in mass media we are aiming to build this into a ‘property’ that can create an additional ‘event’ for Pepperfry to drive engagement and sales.”

     

    He added, “The campaign is well timed to capitalize on the occasion of 15th August which has become an important retail shopping event for consumers. So, purely from a consumer mind-set perspective, this is a good period to generate greater demand for Pepperfry furniture.”

     

  • The campaign Insight is based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research including in-depth customer interviews

    Pepperfry unveils latest campaign promoting prominent features

    By A Correspondent

     

    Pepperfry has taken on the task of expanding the online furniture category through its new 360o marketing campaign. The campaign comprises three creative executions which will be aired on television, across digital video channels and in multiplexes. Pepperfry’s outlay on this campaign is expected to be above Rs.10 crore.

     

    Pepperfry staff (including the founders and CXO’s) regularly deliver furniture alongside the delivery teams to understand customer purchase behaviour and the needs of Indian householders. The campaign Insight is based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research including in-depth customer interviews.

     

    The customer insight behind Pepperfry’s new campaign is that getting furniture made at home brings with it the physical inconvenience, time escalations, budget overruns and a lack of design/functional fidelity. Customers who have gone through the process of getting furniture made at home have been through these issues but those who haven’t undergone the experience of getting furniture made at home vastly underestimate the issues involved while often over estimating the perceived benefits.

     

    Through this campaign Pepperfry seeks to educate customers about these potential pitfalls and provides them with an alternate choice of buying furniture through a seamless and Happy Pepperfry experience. Over the past five years Pepperfry has processed more than 3 million customer shipments from its highly curated merchandize range of over 1 Lakh furniture and home products. As Pepperfry works directly with small and medium sized businesses who manufacture the products themselves, it is able to provide great value affordable options across all price segments.

     

    Commenting on the objective of this campaign, Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO Pepperfry, said “Our goal is to help 20 Million customers create beautiful homes by 2020. In these last few years, Pepperfry has reached a tipping point amongst early adopters and via this campaign we will expand the market by going up the product life cycle curve to address the early majority of shoppers.”

     

    Talking about the insight and idea, Debarjyo Nandi, Sr. Vice President, Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi explained; “There are several of us who believe that getting furniture made at home will give us more control and get us exactly what we want. The problem is most of us are not sure of what we really want and what we are really getting into. The noise, dust, displacement, delays and budget overflows make it an even more painful process. Pepperfry is the easier and simpler solution to getting your furniture on-time, at a fixed price and the design and finish you want.”

     

  • Etailers like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Pepperfry and others have geared up ahead of festive season and the big sales this week

    Gearing up for the Big Sales

     

    By Indulekha Aravind

     

    Manjunath V*, who juggles two jobs with college in Bengaluru, is one of Flipkart’s 16,000-strong delivery force, dropping off 70-80 packages a day. After his night shift with a courier firm ends at 3 am, he snatches a few hours of sleep before leaving for the ecommerce giant’s warehouse at 6.30 am. But, from this week, when the “Big Billion Days” sale kicks off, he says he will be reporting to work at 5 am and looking at an 11-hour shift so that he can complete that day’s sale season deliveries, likely to be 100 a day.

     

    “There’s no fixed time to when we finish — the sooner we complete the deliveries, the earlier we can leave.

     

    But we need to finish that day’s deliveries,” says the 19-year-old. Manjunath’s employer, Flipkart, is looking at shipping 1,03,000 packages daily during “Big Billion Days”, as opposed to 65,000 on other days, according to multiple operations executives with the firm. Its Gurgaon-headquartered rival, Snapdeal, saw sales grow 10 times during its preview Diwali sale held last Monday and is optimistic about similar numbers as the festival season picks up. Furniture marketplace Pepperfry is looking at sales doubling during these months while payment-solutions-firm-turned-marketplace Paytm is eyeing 3x growth. If these projections sound dazzling, it’s because the Diwali-Dassera season is traditionally the time when Indians have shopped the most online, and ecommerce companies expect 40% of annual sales to come from the months of October and November.

     

    And while deep discounts are still the way to the customer’s wallet for companies like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, ecommerce companies across sectors are also trying to leave nothing to chance while ensuring the customer gets what he ordered, on time.

     

    Gearing Up for Busier Days

    Though the sales only begin in mid-October, companies began supply-chain preparations as far back as May. In fact, Snapdeal says they begin gearing up for next year’s Diwali from the previous year. “Unlike Flipkart, we have a sale every week, which is a good stress test to gauge customer experience. We began getting ready for this Diwali as soon as the last festival season was over,” says Jayant Sood, chief customer experience officer at Snapdeal. The company, valued at $4.5 billion in its latest round of funding, saw a 15x surge in traffic last Diwali, according to Sood. Being a marketplace, it does not own inventory or a logistics team but, last Wednesday, Snapdeal announced a $20 million investment in third-party logistics player GoJavas, in which it holds a 40% stake. GoJavas, says Sood, now delivers in 350 cities. The fresh fund infusion in the logistics company is in addition to the $100 million Snapdeal has invested in the last six months to improve its logistics and supply chain.

     

    In Bengaluru, rival Flipkart has been streamlining its delivery process to meet the daily order avalanche during its biggest annual sale. With last year’s edition of its Big Billion Day coming in for a lot of flak from customers for price discrepancies, inadequate stock and server glitches, forcing the company’s founders Sachin and Binny Bansal to apologise to customers, the company has ramped up its back-end operations.

     

    Flipkart now has 16,000 delivery staff, has increased the number of fulfilment centres from 13 to 16 this year and has automated its warehouses, says Neeraj Aggarwal, senior director, delivery operations. According to another operations executive, who requested not to be named, half the members at each delivery hub have been trained to make 300 deliveries a day. “Earlier, staff would spend a lot of time settling the cash-on-delivery accounts. This year, we have installed cash deposit machines in cities where will see the heaviest sales so that they just need to deposit it in the machines,” he says. Handheld devices to scan items and segregating categories by the day are also expected to cut delay, he says.

     

    For Paytm, this will be the company’s first Diwali as a marketplace. The Alibaba-backed firm began talks with suppliers and logistics firms three months ago and has tied up with 30 courier partners. “We’ve ensured our third-party logistics partners have enough exclusive capacity and have shared our plans about expected sale volumes,” says Saurabh Vashishtha, vice-president, business, at the company’s headquarters in Noida. “We also have very strict service-level agreements whereby the logistics partners will incur losses if a package is not delivered on time. Also, the volume of business we give them would depend on the service,” he adds.

     

    Paytm has introduced a logistics cloud for local courier companies which are big in that particular region but not plugged into the ecommerce economy because they lack the technological capability. Similarly, the company is also creating a warehouse cloud to integrate warehouses run by third parties into its system, which would then be available to the smaller merchants selling on Paytm. “We negotiate with the warehouses so that the small players get a better rate,” says Vashishtha, who attributes the glitches that happened with most etailers last festive season to not anticipating the demand. At present, over 60,000 merchants sell on Paytm.

     

    Of Bulk Orders and Deliveries

    Delivery is particularly crucial for furniture sellers like Urban Ladder and Pepperfry, with staff usually having to assemble the items they deliver. Urban Ladder does not outsource any of its logistics and operates with a team of 850 delivery staff, predominantly in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. “We control the last mile, so we also take care of the training of all the delivery staff,” says Kaustabh Chakraborty, vice-president, operations. Though the company states that it will take 15 days to process an order, Diwali is the time when there are multiple requests to deliver much faster.

     

    “Each customer might also order 20-25 items for their homes, if it’s a “gruhapravesh” (housewarming) and there is huge pressure from the customer to deliver everything together,” says Govind Raj Kaushik, manager, operations, at the company’s warehouse in Bengaluru.

     

    Furniture marketplace Pepperfry has also moved to take complete ownership of its logistics chain. “This year, we stopped using third-party logistics providers. The entire distribution chain is now centrally controlled so the tradeoff that might have been there between our product and a rival’s will not be there this year,” says Ambareesh Murty, cofounder and chief executive of the company.

     

    Murty says Pepperfry, which ships 300,000 items a month, is looking at a 100% jump in the festival season, just as it did last year. “We deliver to 430 cities and will add another 200 in the next two months,” adds Murty. The company’s fleet of trucks and delivery personnel have seen a five-fold jump from the beginning of the year. It also has an app called Far Eye to track the deliveries in real time. “A delivery does not take more than half an hour. An alert is sent to the supervisor if it takes more time,” says Ashish Shah, Pepperfry’s chief operating officer.

     

    Feet On the Ground

    For hyperlocal grocery platform Grofers, the biggest challenge is ensuring there is adequate staff to deliver the 100% surge in orders it expects in electronics and gift items. The jump in demand is accompanied by higher attrition with delivery staff taking leave during the festival season, says cofounder Albinder Dhindsa.

     

    “We normally add around 10% staff month-on-month but we’ve ramped up our delivery capacity by 40% to 4,200 over the last two months anticipating the dip in attendance,” he says. “We also need to make sure we have a good relationship with the suppliers so that we are the preferred vendor.”

     

    Neeraj Jain, cofounder of electronics marketplace Zopper, is anticipating his first challenging Diwali because, till last year, the company was merely connecting buyers and sellers through calls, and not accepting orders. To help the smaller merchants on its platform deliver on time, Zopper will be underwriting part of the demand.

     

    “We have told them to scale up operations and will be paying them, even if there is not sufficient demand, provided their services are available exclusively to us. We’re also offering incentives if they perform well,” says Jain.

     

    One would expect higher pressure on delivery staff during the peak season, but many did not seem apprehensive. Ravish Kumar*, who picks up returned goods for Amazon in New Delhi and is on the payrolls of a third-party firm, says he will probably have to pick up 50 packages a day, instead of 40. “There was pressure when there were fewer centres but not anymore,” he says, though he adds wryly that the company does not give mithai dabbas for its delivery staff. Amazon also runs a programme whereby a delivery associate is given the opportunity to work as a process associate during the festival season, which could translate into a promotion. On average, in the bigger ecommerce companies, delivery staff are paid `12,000 a month. A customer associate with Vulcan, a logistics firm that works with Snapdeal, says the number of van deliveries might go up from 10-15 to 20 a day during Diwali and Dassera, with an additional `20 paid for each delivery after 20. In Mumbai, delivery agent Arjun Kumar is preparing to hit the jackpot during the festive season, when deliveries are likely to cross 100 a day from the usual 45-50, which would earn him incentives.

     

    “My take home could easily double in these three months,” says the 23-year-old. A section of delivery staff in Mumbai like Kumar had gone on strike earlier this year pressing for the fulfillment of some 21 demands that ranged from toilet facilities to incentives for additional deliveries and returns but unions affiliated to Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon and the like have adopted a more conciliatory position since. “Around 15 of these demands have been met,” says Sachin Gole, a leader of the MNS Kamgar Sena. It was the delivery staff affiliated to MNS, the Raj Thackeray-led political party, that had gone on strike in July. “These companies have promised to give delivery personnel incentives once the hectic sale season concludes,” adds Gole.

     

    But though personnel have been recruited, incentives promised and stress tests carried out, there is still one factor that could throw the best laid plans out of gear. “If it rains, it will spoil our delivery schedule,” admits the Flipkart operations executive quoted earlier.

     

    *Names have been changed on request (With inputs from Rahul Sachitanand)

     

    Source:The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2015, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

    Licensed to republish

     

  • The account the online furniture brand is estimated to be Rs 80-100 crore

    Pepperfry appoints Motivator as Media AOR

    By A Correspondent

     

    Motivator, the GroupM media agency, has bagged the media duties of leading online furniture and home products marketplace, Pepperfry. The account of the Mumbai-based Pepperfry is estimated to be approximately Rs 80-100 crore. Over the last six months, Motivator has added several clients under its portfolio including brands like Honda cars and Disney Studios.

     

    As a part of the media mandate, Motivator will be responsible for managing the traditional and digital media planning activities for Pepperfry. The agency will be working closely with the team at Pepperfry to plan and implement pioneering campaigns tapping various communication channels including emerging media avenues.

     

    Speaking on awarding its media duties to Motivator, Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO Pepperfry said, “We are confident about Motivator’s ability to deliver innovative strategies to assist us in building a strong consumer brand. Their fresh approach towards media planning and the strong synergy with our plans makes it a cohesive partnership. We look forward to work with them.”

     

    Trishul Bhumkar, General Manager Motivator said “It’s an exciting challenge to change the way Indian consumers buy furniture and we are excited to be a part of this challenge. In continuance of working with client who expect business results rather than only media strategies, PepperFry is a great addition to the family. Motivator’s best foot is forward in this challenge.”

     

  • The marketing mix also features a sustained radio campaign, on-ground activation and key outdoor promotions across top cities

    Pepperfry greets consumers with ‘Happy furniture to you’ insight

    By A Correspondent

     

    Online furniture and home marketplace Pepperfry has launched an integrated brand campaign. It features a series of high impact television commercials supported by a 360-degree media mix consisting of print, digital, outdoor, radio, social and on-ground activation. Through this campaign Pepperfry plans to enter homes this festive season with “Happy Furniture to You” as its unique brand proposition.

     

    Basis extensive consumer insights gained over the last two and a half years, Pepperfry understands that furniture shopping for consumers can be a tedious process. It is often beset with quality and service related apprehensions. Discerning new-age Indian couples are therefore, looking for an alternative that helps them to buy the best for their homes without any of the hassles involved.

     

    The campaign has been conceptualized by Saatchi & Saatchi and consists of a theme film and two supporting films that highlight Pepperfry’s value propositions of “Free Delivery and Assembly” and “100% Satisfaction or Money Back Assurance” for consumers.

     

    Talking about the new campaign, Debarjyo Nandi, Vice-President Saatchi & Saatchi said, “Creating differentiation in the online shopping space is a huge challenge today, but what helped us was to understand Pepperfry’s approach to furniture and consumers – ‘we get it done just like you would get it done yourself.’ He further adds, “This in essence is beyond business, it becomes personal and this assurance coupled with features like free delivery and assembly is what will help consumers overcome any mental barriers towards buying high-value items like furniture online. We attempted to bring this spirit and the benefits alive in the communication.”

     

    The marketing mix also features a sustained radio campaign, on-ground activation and key outdoor promotions across top cities. The campaign will also come alive on digital and social platforms like Google, YouTube and Facebook.

     

    Kashyap Vadapalli

    Commenting on the campaign Kashyap Vadapalli, Chief Marketing Officer, Pepperfry says, “We want to make the experience of buying furniture online a delightful and easy process”. He further elaborates, “The campaign will multiply our brand reach and build confidence in the minds of our prospective customers. We are already the market leaders in online furniture segment and this campaign will help us further strengthen our leadership in the furniture industry.”