Supam Maheshwari is an IIM Ahmedabad pass out and an Engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and CEO and Founder of the biggest baby product marketplace in India FirstCry.com started in 2010. Supam is a first generation entrepreneur, the need to do something on his own led him to open his venture FirstCry.com. During the journey of FirstCry, he also co-founded XpressBees which today is one of the largest logistic companies in India.
Prior to launching FirstCry.com, Supam was the co-founder and CEO of Brainvisa Technologies, one of the largest e-Learning company, and was associated with the company from 2000 to 2009.
Foundation of FirstCry
Eight years ago, when choices for baby products in India online were quite limited he used to buy a lot of them for his son only on his business trips abroad. Thus he discovered an opportunity for such platform and conceptualised FirstCry.com. As he began researching further, he figured that the baby and kids industry in India had an approximate turnover of about Rs.50,000 Cr and 95% of these sales were offline.
Today Firstcry has become the largest shopping platform for kids, online, mobile and over 300 franchised brick & mortar shops across more than 100 cities.
Supam Maheshwari- An exemplary leader
Supam believes in leading by example and is always the first one to take the initiative, guiding and directing the team to achieve greater heights. As the CEO of the company, Supam leads and oversees the implementation of the company’s long and short-term plans in accordance with its strategy & vision. He has a sharp business mindset and is very details oriented. An unwavering passion for customer service, he believes that one of the biggest features and the most significant competitive edge of a company giving personalized attention to the customers and he strives to achieve that with his employee strength of over 1200 people.
Earlier Firstcry was only following an inventory-based model and was shipping products across the country from four of their warehouses in Pune, Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata. After a few years, they also adding retailers to their platform and gave opportunity to a local retailer to sell their products on FirstCry. The Company also launched its own private label called BabyHug (apparel brand) and CuteWalk (footwear brand).
Talking about their funding FirstCry.com raised a total of $119,000,000 in funding over 6 rounds. The latest funding came from a Series D round on Oct 17, 2016. The company has also acquired Mahindra’s baby product venture Babyoye.
Talking about budding entrepreneurs Supam once stated “The aspiring entrepreneur must remember he/she must identify the right business opportunity, plan well and have the belief, courage and patience to see it through. As far as our business partners are concerned, we provide them complete support in terms of all aspects of business and our training team delivers organized, structured training to them on the same. This process starts from the time the store is finalized and continues right through the life of the business.”
