Improve Inventory Efficiency Throughout the Supply Chain With Smart Merchandising and Warehouse Automation

Increff is a data technology company helping brands and retailers optimize inventory across B2B and B2C sales channels. We provide new-age technology solutions that allow brands to automate inventory management, achieve distributed warehousing and build efficiency in warehouse operations.

Our innovative SaaS solutions allow brands, and retailers, to plan for pre-season, in-season merchandising, and liquidation scenarios. Our solutions help brands to progress on the path towards a sustainable future.

Tell us about yourself? What is your background? What made you get into this line of work?

I am an enthusiastic entrepreneur and a management professional with more than 19 years of work experience as a strategic leader and technology expert. Working with growing startups and tech-industry disruptors, I transformed business processes through re-engineering, digitization, and technological optimization.

Experiencing how technology was changing the retail landscape, solving problems, and bringing efficiency in processes, we co-founders, Rajul, Romil, and I got thinking about how we can build sustainable supply chains, especially for short-life cycle products e.g. fashion, beauty, lifestyle, through intelligent merchandising and smart inventory management. We discussed tech-driven solutions that can help traditional large brands and startups build operational proficiency to scale sustainable businesses.

This led to the genesis of Increff, a company that is focused on using high-tech innovative solutions for data-driven decision-making and building efficiencies for retail and fashion brands. 

What inspired your business? What problem are you trying to solve and for whom?

We help retailers, e-commerce, and D2C brands solve the challenging issue of inventory management, globally. Inaccurate planning and execution lead to excessive mismanagement and monetary losses. Our solutions enable brands to plan, buy and distribute the right quantity of inventory across all sales channels so they achieve better sales, greater inventory turns, higher revenue, and improved margins.

Also, environmentalists have raised serious concerns about how the fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters in the world. The fibres and garments used in the industry contribute immensely to greenhouse emissions, and water & land pollution. Inefficient practices, inaccurate inventory production, distribution, and management, result in a lot of waste that is non-biodegradable and causes harm to the environment.

Hence the urgent need for innovative solutions that can help brands make more sustainable decisions and ensure minimum wastage. Using technology we help brands analyze their true demand potential and make informed decisions on what to produce, how much to produce, and the best channel to sell on.

Accurate demand forecasting, demand specific store allocation, faster order fulfilment, reduces chances of wastage and unsold inventory ending up in landfills.

An outline of your magic sauce. How do you differ from the competition?

Our founders are graduates of some of the world’s most prestigious universities and have combined industry experience of more than 60 years. Our new-age solutions are built considering the drawbacks of traditional solutions.

They are designed to address granularities in decision-making, similar to the uniqueness and dynamism of the fashion industry, and built to assist retail brands in establishing a strong, flexible, inventory management foundation that is easy to adapt to the changing demand patterns and trends.

We have automated inventory management, and our software solutions are built on self-learning algorithms that improve inventory accuracy. They are highly secure, certified by ISO 27001:2013, as we commit to maintaining confidentiality and integrity of our clients.

We set ourselves apart from the competition because we believe that innovation is the best way to flourish and stay ahead in the competition, thus we’ve revolutionised the way merchandisers and planners work today.

With regular software updates, we keep our technology solutions top-notch and also strive to constantly improve our internal processes for the best quality service.

Where do you see your company going in 5 years?

We aspire to be the world’s most influential technological solution firm that optimises the world’s inventory. We are currently focusing on global expansion after a successful execution in India. We’ve formed connections with a variety of organisations and individuals to aid us in our global commercial development strategy.

We’ll use a variety of SaaS tools to automate a number of supply-side elements for the same clients. Our primary goal is to expand. After a year, we can attain profitability whenever we want. We aspire to be a multibillion-dollar corporation in the next 5-7 years.

What is the vision?

We aim to be the world’s most preferred technological solution partner that helps brands optimize inventory and accurately forecast demand, thus leading to efficient inventory management.

What has been your biggest setback so far?

Covid-19 was a challenging time for all of us, as cash crunch was making brands reluctant to invest in technology solutions. Store closures led to large stockpiles of inventory getting stuck and our technology solutions are built to optimize inventory across all sales channels; B2B, B2C, e-commerce, and offline stores.

To address this we built SaaS based solutions so they are easy to implement and faster to deploy. SellFast, a subset solution of Increff WMS, was designed to help brands get online easily. It helped them expose 100% inventory across all marketplaces and capitalize on the existing scenario where e-commerce was more open, and under fewer government regulations, compared to traditional sales outlets during the pandemic.

It allowed brands multi-system integration, a single view of inventory, and faster order processing. We started offering our merchandising solutions for free so brands could automate decision making and bring accuracy in processes.This approach was also taken keeping in mind our future growth, basically, brands that start their online journey with us would integrate with us as they grow.

Covid was a time for innovation and redesign. The growing industry challenges pushed us to craft solutions that could solve those challenges. The idea for our new innovations, Dynamic pricing module, Regional Utilization module, and ReturnsJini, etc. came due to the growth in e-commerce.

What has been your biggest win so far?

We have had many significant achievements and it would be difficult to pick one. Some of our memorable wins, and recognitions, have been: 

• Cool Vendors in Retail: Meeting Customer Basic Expectations Is More Important Than Ever 
• Notable vendor’ in Gartner Asia/Pacific Context: ‘Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems, 2020 and 2021
• Representative vendor Gartner Market Guide for Retail Assortment Management Applications, 2020 and 2021
• Notable vendor in the Critical Capabilities report for WMS by Gartner 2020
• Recognised in ‘Now Tech’ by Forrester Research: Q1 2021: Warehouse Management Systems
• Runners up in Loomish Sustainable Retailing category for the Fashion Innovation Sustainability Award
• Our most recent achievement is the CE worldwide award for “Most Admired & Preferred Enterprise Software Emerging Unicorn”

Furthermore, we began our journey in India and now have a significant client base in the Middle East and the United Kingdom. We’ve created critical alliances across Europe and the United States to help us along this growth path. Many global brands and e-commerce players like PUMA, hummel, GAP, Levi’s, celio, adidas, Vero Moda, Pepe jeans, Calvin Klein, Namshi, Amazon, etc. and 3PL players like Aramex, Wincanton etc. trust our solutions, and some leading brands have even replaced global behemoths to implement our solutions.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

The energy, passion, and experience of the founding team, our global problem statement, and unique technology/data-led solution are critical elements.

We have an open transparent culture which clearly communicates our vision and allows employees to share ideas and innovate towards a common goal.

We have a growing, global, client base and a trusted investor pool, who have witnessed astounding results of our solutions and are reaping benefits of it.

We have expanded our market size into different retail verticals, where we are competing with legacy solutions and replacing them. All this is crucial in convincing our investors and building further trust.