The shortest leg of an ecommerce order’s journey – the last mile – is the most complex and can make or break the consumer experience. It is a different ball game altogether when it comes to bulky shipments like furniture or home appliances. Such deliveries can involve multiple steps, including entering a consumer’s home to unload and, if necessary, install the merchandise.
“From a simple pickup request to the final delivery, a package crosses many hands, and at each touch point, there is a service experience that can be either bad or good,” explains Gangadhar Reddy, Founder, Logicarts.
The flashbulb moment
The idea to launch Logicarts came from Reddy’s extensive experience as a supply chain head for companies such as Jubilant, Godrej, and Ninjakart. He identified major gaps in the end-to-end logistics of heavy, bulky goods from seller to customer, especially in Tier II and Tier III cities.
Reddy believed that this was a global problem that needed to be addressed, and set out to create a single network connecting sellers and consumers efficiently. He founded Logicarts, which started as a one-stop solution for the transportation of bulky and semi-bulky goods. During the course of this journey, he met other like-minded supply chain professionals, Sravan Davuluri and Avinash Atmakuri, who were then onboarded as co-founders of the company. Davuluri now assumes the role of CTO while Atmakuri is the COO at Logicarts.
“Our job is not to only deliver a packet or a shipment, but to give a smooth service and a great experience. The same experience matters because anyone can deliver but only few can offer a good experience – that’s the differentiator for Logicarts,” he said.
Logicarts operates primarily in the B2B space and has some of India’s largest ecommerce players, a popular farm-to-fork retailer, and a well-known apparel and footwear company as well as other medium-sized companies at the state and zonal level as its customers.
The company has taken a conscious decision to enable India’s biggest ecommerce players and has been able to achieve it early on.
Customers are often fraught with challenges such as coordinating with multiple players for first mile, middle mile and last mile, lack of expertise in handling shipments, and wear and tear of shipments during transit.
Logicarts mitigates these challenges by offering expertise in handling bulky and semi-bulky shipments, and ensuring that they are delivered to the customer without any wear and tear. It also provides a seamless service experience and a great customer experience, from pickup to final delivery.
“We have managed to strike a balance between cost and service, giving our customers a superior customer experience at a very competitive price. Our commitment to operational excellence [helps provide] a better customer experience in Tier II and Tier III cities,” he added.
On-demand, real-time capabilities
The future of supply chain and logistics is moving towards a predictable environment where services will be fetched on-demand, and partners will be pushing data in real time. Tech adoption, own network capabilities, and capacities will play a vital role in choosing a logistics partner, and Logicarts plans to be in that space much earlier than its competitors.
Furthermore, last-mile automation is the ultimate future of the logistics industry, and India is seeing its very preliminary setup in dark stores. Logicarts is also working on creating an ecosystem of applications that are seamless and easily accessible.
Thrust on express logistics
Aiming to be in the forefront of the next wave of evolution in express movement, Logicarts plans to grow its express delivery business exponentially.
“We observed that most trucks carrying ecommerce load are not completely full other than the sale season. We experimented with a tech-driven model called ‘Zonal Cluster’ where a client offered to convert their full truck load to cost per shipment (CPS) model. It worked like magic for both parties. While it helped the client to reduce cost, Logicarts benefitted from a stronger network,” shared Reddy on the company’s decision to venture into express logistics.
The company’s express logistics division currently operates in eight states across South, East and West regions and two union territories with over 60 hubs serving last mile deliveries covering 12000+ pincodes.
“We will increase our in-house tech capabilities and build our own robust network across the country,” he added.
In terms of growth strategy, Logicarts aims to pursue both vertical and horizontal growth. It is eyeing organic growth in its current verticals and adding more verticals over time, providing a multi-modal and multi-dimensional leverage over its competitors.
The long-term vision for the startup is to be a great place to work with the best logistics partner to do business with, and to give great returns to investors. The logistics startup is bootstrapped at present and plans to explore funding opportunities in 2023.
