Siksti, a Bengaluru-based mobile-only ecommerce platform, stands out for its capacity to deliver beauty and fashion products to customers in a remarkable short amount of time—60 minutes or less.
Our ability to receive food at our doorsteps in just 10-15 minutes in the modern day is a credit to the meticulously developed hyperlocal solutions offered by companies like Zepto and Blinkit. The services provided by food delivery apps like Swiggy and Zomato, which provide us with freshly prepared meals in less than 60 minutes, are as enticing. However, the situation changes when it comes to non-perishable goods; the majority of direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses want a significant 3–4 working days for product delivery.
Notably, the accelerated Amazon Prime service increases the delivery window to 24 to 48 hours, although a sizable number of items are not included in the Prime membership, necessitating a longer delivery window. Even while Myntra makes an effort to provide two-day rapid delivery, it only makes this service available to a small number of brands and in a small number of urban areas.
Stepping into this gap, Akshay Gulati and Bipin Singh, the founders of Siksti, noticed an obvious discrepancy in the e-commerce industry’s delivery duration when compared to services like Zepto and Swiggy. In June 2023, Siksti was born in reaction to this discovery and made an effort to match the rate of its competitors’ e-commerce delivery with it. The Bengaluru-based company uses an omnichannel strategy for hyperlocal ecommerce and concentrates on the sale of products for beauty, personal care, and fashion, all while striving to speed up deliveries in just 60 minutes.
The CEO and Co-Founder Gulati explains the core of their strategy in these words: “Our brand operates as a complete omnichannel aggregator, abstaining from inventory or hidden storehouses, instead utilizing existing brand outlets and concealed storage facilities.” More than 300 different brands are supported by Siksti’s platform, including well-known names like Lakme, L’Oreal, Colorbar, Maybelline, Jimmy Choo, Plum, Minimalist, Olay, and Sun Scoop. These brands are expertly represented by renowned retail companies like NewU and Beauty and Beyond.
The background of Gulati and Singh’s journey is the retail technology SaaS company Perpule, where they focused their efforts on providing omnichannel and point-of-sale solutions to major retailers like Big Bazaar, Spencers, More, and 24seven. When Amazon bought Perpule at the beginning of 2021, it cemented their relationship with the e-commerce behemoth and exposed them to a growing trend in consumer expectations: a heightened desire for faster delivery in the fields of fashion, beauty, and personal care. Gulati and Singh developed an understanding of the gap between the ability of well-known e-commerce platforms and independent brand websites to dispatch fashion and beauty products within a 96-hour window—a timeframe that misaligns with the evolving consumer experience—while engaged in creating POS/omnichannel solutions for a variety of brands under the umbrella of Perpule and combined with their tenure at Amazon India.
Gulati identifies the obstacle impeding quick delivery and explains, “The resolution lay in tapping into offline establishments, forging an entirely omnichannel framework to expedite the delivery process.” Early in 2023, the couple left Amazon’s job and used their considerable network to gather the necessary goods from large-format merchants, launching Siksti in the process. The young business, which has only been operating for a month, has a favorable contribution margin and an excellent 30% rate of repeat customers, and within the first week of operation, reached the 100-order milestone.
Increasing Delivery Speed: Siksti’s proprietary app is currently available through the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, where it has amassed an amazing 10,000 downloads and a corresponding 4-star rating. The application acts as a conduit for close to 300 various companies that rule Bengaluru’s beauty and personal care market, further highlighting a wide selection of 15,000 unique stock keeping units (SKUs). Gulati elaborates on their ground-breaking approach, saying, “We’ve integrated our backend with a variety of merchants’ ERP and POS systems, enabling real-time inventory synchronization and the dissemination of in-store incentives to customers within a delineated 15-kilometer radius.
When a consumer places an order through our app, a delivery rider immediately sets out to retrieve the item from the store in under ten minutes, and they arrive at the customer’s home no later than 60 minutes later. Working together symbiotically with third-party facilitators like Dunzo, Shadowfax, and Porter to carry out these deliveries. Surprisingly, Siksti takes pleasure in being a “asset-light” business, opting to run without the burden of a traditional inventory system.
