Disrupting The Way Businesses Buy

Do you know –How many sticks are there in your broomstick?

 (Witches are excluded from answering this question because they know! Their flight depends on it)

How many microfibers are there in your car cleaning cloth? 

How many types of eggs are available in your city? 

What temperature range does packing tape work in?

No, this is not a pop quiz. It’s the basis of a unique business model that is disrupting India’s unorganized procurements; ironically, in the organized corporate sector.

Think of a business that delivers –

• 1 Million Microfibre cloth 
• 100 km of packing tape 
• 10,000 security personnel uniforms 
• 10 tons of recycled packaging material
• 1 Million brooms 
• 500 kgs of Soldering Paste
• 100 Tonnes of Wheat Flour a week

Supplying products that are not the typical request for proposal (RFP) – washing, cleaning, disposable, and daily-use products – the ‘unsexy’ stuff, has remained an untapped opportunity in India. In the past three years, 30 year-old entrepreneurs, Udit Karan Chandhok and Akash Narain Mittal have managed to completely disrupt the existing procurement model for large enterprise clients through – Wcube. 

Wcube, through its team of 50 full-time employees, offers supplies in 30 different product categories in 50 million stock keeping units (SKUs). They have over 250 plus large organizations as its clients that include India’s leading unicorn start-ups, renowned multiplex chains, and well-established business conglomerates.

WCube has swiftly captured the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ B2B market by bringing in transparency and accountability to the procurement process. 

The innovation and solutions that allowed them to transform an untapped opportunity into a large-scale business in less than three years are –

• Tap-a-quote – Quote receipt in just 15 minutes. Enabled by a robust tech platform and a team of back-end experts, WCube’s smart pad sales rep delivers a quote in the time span of finishing a cup of tea. 
• Cheaper, better, faster –WCube has developed a proprietary system that allows product quality to be the baseline of product and supplier selection. This reduces the return ratio for the customer. 
• Standardization of ‘unsexy stuff’ –  for the first time in India unorganized products have been standardized by the WCube team. They have standardized the dimensions and material specs of a broom (jhadu), or a security guard’s uniform by bringing it down to a scientific formula. A customer could buy the uniform based on number of hours of duty, number of washes and detergent-friendliness. Such little tweaks have set new benchmarks in production, delivery, and quality standards of these products. 
• 48 – 72 hours delivery PAN India – made available through transparent, real-time tracking

Prior to starting WCube, Akash was an automotive engineer, busy running the family business. Udit was in marketing and strategy at a multinational. Their motivation to build a business was to touch the heart of India through the non-glamorous stuff. Akash quickly learnt to negotiate with traditional sellers of Khari Baoli and local mandis or markets. Udit’s ability to connect with all kinds of people helped him sell their proposition to procurement heads of some of the biggest conglomerates.

For a business that started just before the first COVID-19 wave, the founders have created a unique sprint of transparent and data driven procurement channels across categories such as cleaning products, pantry supplies, maintenance Tools, electrical & plumbing supplies, raw materials for manufacturing, and many others. With their smart-tech enabled supply chain and last mile product assurance science, WCube is quickly establishing a national footprint.  

Can you fathom that a manufacturing company in furnishing that buys over 7 crores rupees worth of ‘Gitti’ in a year? WCube has chosen the path of selling bottom of the pyramid products to large enterprises making ‘Unsexy the New Sexy!’

Some clients Wcube service include JLL, GMR, DLF, AlphaCorp, Oberoi Hotels, Accor Hotels, InstaPizza, Chai Point, Kalyani Rafael, and Dixon Technologies.

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