How Supam Maheshwari’s Small Startup Became The ‘First Choice’ Of Parents And Kids In India

While it is easy to say that one should never quit, at times, it gets difficult for an entrepreneur to keep up with this old saying. It is true that everyone has to face some obstacles in their journey to success but if you have the courage to rise every time you fall, nobody can stop you from achieving your goal.

For the co-founder of Firstcry, Supam Maheshwari, the doggedness and determination are the two important factors which can make any entrepreneur successful even after the failed ventures. And FirstCry’s journey from a kidswear website to a gamechanger in the D2C market is the perfect example of this.

In this blog we will tell you about the entire origin story of Firstcry and how did Supam Maheshwari managed to gain such popularity in the entrepreneurial world.

First let’s start by discussing background of Supam Maheshwari.

Who is he?

Supam Maheshwari is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Co-founder of the baby care firm, First Cry based in Pune. Born in 1974, Supam has a very sharp business mindset and is best known for his impeccable leadership skills. Moreover, he was the first one in his family to dare to get into the world of business. Supam did his graduation from Delhi College of Engineering and is currently living in Pune with his family.

The success you know, the story you don’t

Unlike most of the successful businessmen in the world who start their professional career as an employee, Supam directly jumped into the entrepreneurial wagon. Soon after completing his post-graduation from IIM Ahmedabad, he began working on a project Brainvisa Technologies and launched the same in 2000. The main strength of that platform lied in its instructional design and end-to-end learning solutions.

Within eight years, Supam managed to establish Brainvisa as one of the largest e-learning solution providers across the world and also went on to expand his first business in the countries like USA, Australia along with two development centers in India as well.

However, in what came as a big surprise, Supam sold off the company to a US-based group Indecomm Global services for $25 million in 2007.

Though Supam exited the project, he was still a part of the organizational activities till the end of 2009.

During his days with Brainvisa, Supam was blessed with a baby girl. As his work required him to travel a lot to the U.S.A and Europe so, he used to bring back a lot of products for his newborn baby.

You can’t argue with the fact that the quality of products available in abroad could be trusted and many of the exquisite baby products were not available locally at that time in India. When he began searching for products for his daughter after selling his company, he found out, there was a huge demand-supply gap in the domestic market for children-focused brands. Further doing proper research about this particular niche, Supam realized that kids industry in India had an approximate turnover of about Rs.50,000 Cr and 95% of these sales were offline. And that’s how the idea of launching FirstCry born.

Building FirstCry

Supam Maheshwari wanted to create a platform which provides a high-quality stuff for kids and also offers a large variety of baby products to the Indian parents. So, he along with his friend Amitava Saha arranged a seed funding of Rs 2.5 crore from their personal savings and started BrainBees Solutions, which later launched Firstcry.com in 2010.

In 2011, BrainBees Solutions came up with another online portal – Goodlife.com, a platform for home and personal care products.

Goodlife.com was a well-planned strategy created by Supam Maheshwari for customer retention. As a result of it, in a matter of 2 years, the platform had about 30% of its customers from Firstcry.

In an attempt to gain profit from both online and offline mediums, Firstcry expanded its physical base to cities like Bhilai, Dehradun, Haridwar, Kanpur, Bharuch etc. Soon after the launch of these stores, the company also decided to associate with some other enterprising and like-minded professionals and opened these franchise stores as well.

By the end of 2014, Firstcry had on-boarded 600 national and international brands, and had also launched its own private label BabyHug (apparel brand) and CuteWalk (footwear brand) which was adding to approximately 20% of their revenues. But what was more shocking that all of this was achieved without any grand marketing or advertising strategy.

Secret behind Firstcry’s success

Isn’t it interesting that a company started from Pune, which used to sell mother and baby care products, is now alleged to be one of the biggest online platforms in Asia, selling the varieties of various children’s products? On their website, you will be able to discover more than 2,00,000 remarkable merchandises and not only this they are also connected to more than 6000 brands. Supam’s ability to think strategic and maintain a good balance of the micro and macro elements of a business is what makes him and his business so successful.