India’s direct to consumer sector is booming at a high rate and is also experiencing a huge funding influx into this sector. According to a report between January 2020 and August 2021, Venture Capitalists firms have backed around 146 D2C brands.
The internet first brands got so many advantages in the market due to the pandemic, smooth supply chain process and providing products that are customer-centric in nature. This is a major reason that the investors are putting huge amounts on the Indian D2C brands. According to a report by Avendus Group, D2C brands could be looking at $100-billion addressable consumer opportunity by 2025.
To know more about this, we spoke to Abhishek Negi, Co-founder, Eggoz.
Eggoz is a D2C brand that’s serving nutrition eggs to its customers with an aim to make the unorganized sector into an organized one and also helping farmers of rural farmers of north India to improve their yield and income.
Funds to grow
Last month, the company bagged a funding of around $3.5 million led by Nabaventures and also participated in many funding rounds. Abhishek Negi told us how the company is utilizing it, he said “With the recent funding we have raised, we are mostly utilizing it to scale our presence across the country. Right now, Eggoz is the number one brand of North India and is limited to Delhi NCR up and in the east side of India. With the recent funding, we are opening our markets in Chandigarh Jaipur as well. So now we are launching to go in all the major hubs of the country, which starts with Bangalore and we have opened stores there last month, and now aiming to scale in metro towns as well. With this funding, we’re building the right set of team.”
Negi also told us about the fund raising journey, “Fundraising journey was never easy for us. Eggoz was founded in 2017 and for the initial two, three years of our business, we were not a brand. Since the beginning there were a lot of challenges in terms of understanding the business, how eggs can become a branded discovery in India. There are many investors who said that this company will not scale, and sustaining and building a big business would be tough. But the perseverance at the end of the day has helped us, and passed us through all the challenges. We’ve got touch with the right set of investors who are there with us, including our angel investors.”
Battling supply chain challenges
D2C marketplace is not just about customization, but it also is about innovation, faster deliveries and timeliness delivery. Negi told us about the challenges that the brand is facing in this perspective, “For us there are two parts of logistics, as it is for the F&B companies. The first part focuses on pickups and collection from farmers and bringing it to the processing centers. The second part focuses on last mile delivery to deliver processed eggs and packed it so that it can go back to your nearby Kirana to modern trade warehouses to online general warehouses and so on and so forth. So the first mile of the entire business model that we have developed and supply chain structure is centered around freshness that’s to deliver the freshest possible eggs to the consumer. Because right now what we’re doing at every consumption hub is that we source and procure eggs from farmer partners which are located in the vicinity. So we don’t need to go 250 to 300 kilometers from a consumption hub. The idea is very straightforward that we have to ensure freshness for consumers because fresh eggs retain the nutrition in them so that every egg which has been consumed by consumers out there, must be bioavailable nutritious.”
“We want to offer products that are better in taste, better in quality and much more safe. Our whole supply chain is focussed around freshness. So, the first mile happens through third party suppliers and for the last mile, we are working with a startup logistics provider that can fulfill our delivery on a day to day basis”, Abhishek Negi highlights.
Negi signed off by saying “We aim to scale and go to 40-50 key cities in India and to bring that we’re offering a good quality product to every consumer. Currently, the quality of eggs available in the market is not safe for consumers and eggs that’re sold in India are unpackage and untraceable. Majority of the eggs have a lot of antibiotics and by the time they reach the table, their nutritional value falls by 70-80%.Our aim is to deliver quality produced eggs in a fresh manner to all customers in the major cities.”
