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IT – Just A Wallflower? No More, Maybe Baby’s Breath

Let’s see why like Gypsophilia - which is also about cancer research and baby showers now rather than a bunch spread in the background- technology is now so much more than a filler in the bouquet of business!

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DQINDIA Online
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Gaurav-Sharma1 Photograph: (Gaurav-Sharma1)

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New technologies are the ‘Juliet Roses’ to watch for. After all, it has taken a lot of time for them to blossom - all ready and ripe! But they can also be expensive –specially when you don’t use them well. Get ready for hyper-personalisation, dark stores, drones, robots, anticipatory delivery, quick commerce tools for perishables, Metaverse and more. When it comes to technology, it’s neither easy nor boring to be in the business of flower delivery. So who is the petal here – the business or the technology? And who is the fern? Gaurav Sharma, CTO, FNP (Ferns N Petals) gives us a whiff of this new arrangement.

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Where does IT sit in the garden of your business?

Ours is an old brand. And I was using it before joining the company. It has become all the more relevant in today’s scattered world where people may not be in proximity to their friends and loved ones but want to be there in some way. That’s why everything matters- right from what these people choose to gift, what products they go through, how easy their search is, and how well-informed they are about what’s available and possible as per the region and occasion that day. That’s all made easy and fun with technology.

Metaverse, digitalisation or AI-Nothing beats the personal touch and smell of a flower.

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Ours is a perishable product category. Flowers have to be delivered fresh and quickly- and this makes ours a complex model because, at the same time, the delivery has to be right as per the occasion, the variety of choice and the punctuality part of it. The same complexity is present on the fulfilment side. Ours is a nationwide network with warehouses and dark stores in many regions. The entire backbone of logistics has to be run well through technology. More so, when you have orders like ‘delivery in next three hours’. Technology helps a lot in allocation, prioritization and mapping. Address accuracy and timely delivery get even more nuanced in the case of flowers because it is a surprise item and the buyer is seldom the receiver – unlike in e-commerce. Technology plays an end-to-end role in many ways.

So how does technology fix these issues?

Technology is used in multiple ways to help here. There are tech interventions in guiding the customer to input the address for address accuracy. It is augmented through suggestions and auto-fill and location APIs to capture the latitude and longitude of the locality or the area. For the short shelf-life part- to be able to deliver from the store that is located nearest to the customer- this aspect involves showing what is available to purchase for the customer from the location and also enabling allocation to the correct store.

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Any use/intended use of Blockchain somewhere?

Not right now and not envisaged for the near future, as of now.

Any chance drones and robots might be seen doing all this any time soon? The way biggies like Amazon are exploring?

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In our model -where we are also spread in smaller regions and formats- automation at this scale is not as easy as it is for the big e-commerce players. Our needs and imperatives are different- we lean more towards time-limits and personalisation.

Anticipatory shipping- too soon an idea for India?

We already do personalised reminders as per the occasion and customer patterns. The item selected will ultimately be the customer’s choice- because it’s a gifting model. But we make sure we equip them with data and recommendations so that they do not forget to gift their loved ones.

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Is technology a challenge at the level of the ecosystem - especially when many last-mile vendors are still in the unorganised and not-too-tech-savvy canopies?

Yes, at some level. Especially with fixed-time deliveries. And for products like cakes and some flowers with a limited shelf-life. We take care of most of these needs through our own delivery stores.

How far is personalisation from Netflix-isation in the flower delivery space? With Algorithms that adapt to individuals- and not categories?

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Personalised gifting is a new category and experience that we have started investing in. More and more granular personalisation is a continuous journey. We are happy to explore conversational mechanisms that cover occasions and recommendations- and we are working in the direction of using Gen AI that can help customers with an open-ended conversation on what gifts to buy.

Can technology be explored for upstream areas too- with crop planning, climate control agriculture and predictive farming?

Right now, we plan our inventory as per the customer’s tastes and needs. The lifecycle of flowers is limited so if we do not forecast well, it can lead to inventory losses and costs. Hence, we are doing forecasting as per trends and occasions. The procurement part is something we can explore in future.

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Is technology already a hygiene factor in your business?

A lot is changing today- especially with Quick Commerce. Yes, it’s a hygiene factor in many ways. But our problems and goals are a little different – like midnight deliveries, occasion-based inventories, fulfilment as per location etc. Without technology, fulfilment can be quite challenging. The gifting space has kept evolving and we continue to work on ‘the delight factor’ for our customers.

Is anything exciting to be unwrapped soon?

We are observing that customer experiences will evolve in more and more personalised interactions. Technology investments are in progress to tap that need as well as look into more automation, smart category planning, new products and swift fulfilment.

With Metaverse, endless apps, remote workplaces and more and more AI redefining our lives – would tangible flowers stay relevant?

Nothing beats the personal touch and smell of a flower. Both physical and virtual worlds will evolve and gifting will evolve as well. But flowers will stay.

Gaurav Sharma

CTO, FNP (Ferns N Petals)

By Pratima H

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in

 

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