Westcoast entrepreneur Tabrez Khan puts a fresh spin on gently used baby products
When you meet Tabrez Khan for the first time, he is quite unassuming until you get him to speak about his passion—precared.com. Precared is a website offering pre-used baby products that are sanitised, cleaned and graded according to the product specifications. The products on offer are toys, baby gear, car seats, prams, cradles and more.
Although the concept of reusing baby products is new to India, our country is well versed with the overall concept of recycling and reusing. As kids, many of us were handed down toys and other items from our older siblings…much to our annoyance.
On the other hand, Indians don't like to buy 'used' products, especially baby gear for their children, although internationally the concept is well established. That is also because international customers have been using baby gear like cots, prams and baby seats much longer than Indians.
Khan had to work around this mindset in trying to win over more than 2,000 customers who now trust the brand and its offerings. "When I started out, I had no idea about start-ups and entrepreneurship," he shares, "It was a simple and interesting idea, and I wanted to see how effectively I could execute it in the market."
Like all entrepreneurs, Khan was motivated to start this venture from his personal need to sell off toys and other items used by his child. Unfortunately, no such facility existed when he set out to do this; which is when he thought of launching Precared. Khan collected Rs. 4 lakh worth of inventory by June 2011, which was lost when his warehouse was flooded in July 2013. "When the floods washed away my inventory, I was contemplating a shutdown. But what kept me going were the constant enquires that I would receive from customers. On an average, there were at least 10 enquiries per day," he says.
After the floods, Khan had to pick up the pieces and start from scratch but being a single-member organisation, it wasn't easy. Most of the work had to be outsourced, requiring him to do the pick-ups with help from family.
Khan's never-say-die attitude, even in the face of losses and cynicism about his business model, paid off recently when he decided to change his online portal to a marketplace model. Under the marketplace model, the sourced products are listed on the website and the seller is paid only when their product gets sold. This has helped his business, allowing him to build a more robust operations team, putting behind his days of self-doubt.
"We should be conscious about reusing and recycling and Precared is taking 'baby' steps towards this," he signs off.
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