The quick e-commerce segment has been steadily growing in recent times – the sector is expected to reach $5 billion by 2025, in India. It has gained traction and attracted the attention of several investors and companies across the world. E-grocery unicorn Grofers is one of them, and it rebranded itself as Blinkit to reflect its focus on quick commerce and as it continues to compete in the fast-growing sector.
Grofers has rebranded itself with a purpose. Blinkit, the company, will be focussing on instant commerce which is promised to be “indistinguishable from magic.”
“Once upon a time, a few months ago, we started on a journey to build the future of commerce with 10 minute delivery of most of the stuff our customers need in their daily lives. Today, we already process over a million orders a week, across 12 cities in India. And this is just a start,” Albinder Dhindsa, founder and CEO, Grofers said in a blog post.
Backed by names such as Zomato and SoftBank, the eight-year-old Grofers claims to be the fastest online shopping platform in the country. It has been growing steadily over the past years and became a newly minted unicorn this August after it raised $120 million in fresh funding. Earlier this year, the company rolled out a new initiative – starting 10-minute grocery deliveries in some of the top cities across the country. “Our next goal is to bring the delivery time to below 10 mins for the majority of our customers within the next 45 days. If we don’t serve your area yet, we will be there very soon,” Dhindsa had said then. However, this invited criticism from several sections of the society, who felt that Grofers would be pushing its riders to drive fast and break traffic rules to deliver groceries in 10 minutes. Dhindsa clarified that that was not the case.
Coming back to the rebranding, Dhindsa added, “We learned a lot as Grofers, and all our learnings, our team, and our infrastructure is being repurposed to pivot to something with staggering product-market fit – quick commerce. Today, we are surging ahead as a new company, and we have a new mission statement – “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. And we will no longer be doing this as Grofers – we will be doing it as Blinkit.”
The company is also hiring – Dhindsa said that Grofers (now Blinkit) is on the lookout for people who can think like founders and not as employees, and asked interested individuals to drop him an e-mail.
Grofers is one of the several names that compete in the aggressively-growing quick commerce segment, competing with the likes of Google-backed Dunzo, Swiggy’s Instamart (which promises delivery in 15 minutes and will roll out this service from January), BigBasket, and Mumbai-based Zepto. It also expects to achieve ₹10,000 crores in gross merchandise value (GMV) by March 2022.
