How Digital Integration Helped Godrej Interio Expand its Presence During the Pandemic

Pandemic has drastically changed consumer behavior. With the work-from-home culture coming in, consumers started spending more time at their homes and realized the need for furniture that was missing in their study or living rooms.

As work-from-home started, initially, a lot of people did not have the right kind of seating arrangements at home or the right kind of desks at home. At that time, brands like Godrej Interio started educating people in terms of what is good for their ergonomics, wellness at home and what furniture should they opt for to maintain the right postures.

The brand also quickly revamped its portfolio to meet the changing consumer demands. And as the pandemic continued for a long time and the work-from-home and stay-at-home became longer, the wear and tear of the products started of the existing products. At that time, Godrej Interio introduced an essential range which was sleeker-looking quality furniture at compatible prices.

“Apart from this, we started our own website, increased the number of pin codes where we could deliver, along with enhancing the overall consumer experience. We deployed the technology on product portfolio side for store walkthroughs, 3D drawings, and 3D layouts and on the supply chain side, we rejigged our supply chain operations to supply faster. This really helped to reach a larger number of customers,” asserts Anil Sain Mathur, COO, Godrej Interio.

Omnichannel: The Way Forward

The pandemic did not derail any of the plans for Godrej Interio because the brand always believed that omnichannel is a way to go forward for this category of business. 

“Our retail strategy remains the same. It has taken a little diversion of bringing in more digital tools at the point of sale to make consumer’s decision-making journey easier. We are also increasing the delivery points from 2,000 pin codes to 5,000 pin codes.” states Mathur.

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“During the past few months, we continued to expand our offline presence along with integrating online and offline together. We learned to utilize the stores effectively as after browsing online, the customers started visiting the stores to make the final purchase. This way, our conversion rates have also increased,” he added.

At present, e-commerce contributes 5 percent of the total revenue of Godrej Interio. 

Digital Integrations

According to Gartner Global Survey, companies are spending 2.5 percent of their revenue on IT and 21 percent of overall budgets are being directed toward digital initiatives. In line with the global trend in the furniture retail industry, Godrej Interio has been investing heavily in key digital technologies, automation, processes, and people to build a robust, truly omnichannel, omnipresent furniture brand with the largest footprint across the country.

“It is very critical to have a digital strategy for the organization. At the backend, we introduced Robotic Process Automation to automate the processes and as result, it has helped us in speeding up the communication as many team members were working from home. We also implemented technology to reduce the cost of being connected to all stakeholders along with reducing the cost of the supply chain,” he states.

“Whereas on the front end, we introduced our own website along with introducing a visual search for consumers. We also brought in AI which is able to read designs, materials, geometrics, recommend products based on the configuration of the home that people have. The 360-degree walkthrough of the store lets consumers zoom in on products and also interact with the store personnel. The other thing that we have brought in is a 3D configurator so that one could just sit and design and create along with the sales team and visualize how the room looks before they can even think about finalizing it,” he further adds.

Future Plans

Godrej Interio is currently present in over 650 cities with over 250 exclusive showrooms and 800 dealers. Going ahead, the brand is planning to expand its presence in offline as well as offline domains.

“We have a growth rate of close to 18 percent or so for B2C products and overall growth rate accruing up to 20 percent and going ahead we should be able to grow about at least 10 percent this fiscal year over FY19-20,” he asserts.

“Next fiscal we plan to consolidate where we are and we are in the next fiscal looking at growing over 25 percent in all the product categories. We plan to double the market growth rate and are looking forward to enhancing our sales from the customized product categories. We will also be integrating U&US with the Interio stores. The idea is how does the brand which is today in the range of about Rs 30-40 crore grows big and how can we get into a large scale across the country because today we are operating in only 4 cities - Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai. We are aiming to target Rs 100-200 million in revenue next fiscal for this brand,” he adds.

The brand is also planning to bring all of its dealers onto the e-commerce portal so that the customer can directly book orders and it can be delivered to any part of the country from its dealers to customers. The brand will soon be introducing CIOT in products.