WHAT COMES AFTER SPEED

With competition heating up and an IPO on the horizon, how does Zepto plan to stay ahead in the fast-moving world of quick commerce?

-  By NAINI THAKER

Four years ago, two teenagers went door to door in the by-lanes of Mumbai's Bandra suburb, delivering grocery ordered through a WhatsApp group. Undaunted by the raging pandemic, Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra handed over orders to the early users of their startup, KiranaKart.

What started as a scrappy experiment would soon evolve into one of India's fastest-growing outfits and one that would play a vital role in the thawing of the so-called funding winter for India's startups. But not before it changed its model and introduced the concept of dark stores in India—small warehouses that are not open to the public and which only fulfil online orders from nearby consumers—based on their own experience in early 2021.

At the time, Vohra and Palicha, upon receiving an order, would pick up the items from neighbourhood stores and the delivery would be in 45 to 60 minutes after receiving the order.

"It wasn’t designed for speed," Vohra recalls, “but some customers who lived close to the stores were getting deliveries in 10 to 15 minutes, just by chance.” These users ordered more frequently, prompting the duo to wonder if speed could be a differentiator.

To test their theory, they narrowed the delivery radius to 1 km around a store in Oshiwara and delivered the orders on rented bicycles. “We just wanted to see... If someone ordered and we showed up in 10 minutes, how would they react,” recalls Vohra.

The response, he says, was electric: “You could see the sparkle in their eyes when they received their orders in minutes.” That sparked the idea for Zepto’s dark stores and the 10-minute deliveries. “That was far more conviction in the model than any investor or journalist could offer,” Palicha says.