New Delhi, Sept 4 (KNN) OfficeSmart has recently joined the league of e-commerce portals and seems to be growing at a significant rate lately. The B2B hyper local retailer that supplies office product has come far on its pathway of success since its establishment in early 2014.

The founder of OfficeSmart, Barath Akkihebal, gave a vivid description of the journey to success of his firm.

About OfficeSmart, Barath said, “We supply product that an office requires- from stationaries to gadgets, we sell everything.”

The company has 3000+ SKU (Stock Keeping Units) and more is being added to the stock on monthly basis.

The founder of the company is of the view that rather than supplying to a big established firm, it is better to invest into 10 small enterprises.

According to Barath, they have been helping the minor firms to grow. He said, “We have a client who used to have 45 employees and, they have been growing with current employee structure of about 160 since OfficeSmart started supplying to them.”

The firm faced many hindrances during its growth, the major being the bank’s rejection to sanction the loan.  

“It is easy to say to get a loan but they do not sanction the loan until you have some property or credit record,” Barath said.

“Banks ask for land documents, and since we didn’t have any, we were not eligible to get the loan according to them.” he added.

Any of the banks didn’t even issue him a credit card. It was until recently, that after one year of waiting, his application for the credit card has been accepted.

The rental expenses are also burning the hole in the company’s pocket. “With such high rents, it is very difficult to maintain the rental expenses in a place like Bangalore” said Barath.

OfficeSmart initially used to share its office with another firm named Problem Systems India Ltd who paid the rent initially, but with time, it managed to get over the expenses by supplying the products on credit and get an office of its own.

Although, the bank denied giving loan for funding the start-up, it didn’t deter the will of Barath and his team to start OfficeSmart.

“Since bank didn’t approve of the loan, we went for self -financing to fund OfficeSmart - from friends and family” disclosed Barath.

Barath also gave away all the assets he possessed to manage funds for paying salaries, giving rents and all other company-related expenses.

Talking about the development, the company has shown tremendous growth in last 16 months achieving a huge target of 1 crore and is expected to grow even at a faster rate in coming 6 months.

The USP of the firm is that- it supplies any of the office products you need.

“Lately, we have been working on many tech-driven products required in the office that are in demand” said Barath.

Barath also gave his view regarding the online shopping trends in India.

“Actually there are still people who prefer to shop offline, by traditional means. For example, many customers still rely on Metro cash and Carry Stores. They still want to go to Metro, pick up the products and keep it in the basket and go home” he said.

“We have to put in a lot of effort to convince them to get them to avail our online services.”

The trend of setting up new enterprises is quite significant within the nation. Barath justified this fact by quoting an example of Koramangala street in Bangalore, ‘you can see many start -ups building  their office in 10*10 or 10*20 space of land on the streets of Koramangala. This, itself shows the trend of the growth of start-ups”.

According to the founder, the government is nowhere near doing anything for the betterment of start-ups.

“We sent a consignment to Kolkata and the entire system broke down due to not receiving a form –Form50 that the government policy in West Bengal requires for trading” said Barath.

The other issue with the government, according to Barath, is that it requires paying the VAT and servicing tax on time, while doing nothing about the betterment of the new enterprises.

“It also happens that we give the service and get a delayed payment or sometimes don’t even get paid, but we anyway have to pay the service tax which is unfair,” said Barath.
“There is no regulation or authority we can look upto when we have such issues with the customers,” he added.

Barath was of the view that government still has a lot to do in every aspect of business- be it export or tax system.

“Goods and Service Tax is a hope for us” said Barath. (KNN/ Jyoti)