Our aim is to make a structured kitchen store: Krishna Sighakolli
Our aim is to make a structured kitchen store: Krishna Sighakolli

The kitchenware industry is projected to reach over INR 55 billion revenue by 2020. The ecommerce world has witnessed transition in the kitchenware utilities and its manufacturing has been upgraded to many folds. Organised retail sector has undergone tremendous scaling over the past few years. Overall demand for kitchenware products has increased up to 20-30 per cent in the urban market. These products are either utility or functionality driven.
To further explore the avenues of this sector, Krishna Sighakolli founded Oyekitchen. This startup aims at offering all the exclusive products used in the kitchen. The company imports kitchen tools to make food preparation easier and handy.
Retailer Media caught up with Krishna Sighakolli, Founder, OyeKitchen to understand his vision to support Indian cookware industry through his startup.

How did Revasto India conceptualise OyeKitchen?
Initially, we started as manufacturers of steel utensils in early 70's and then gradually we spread our wings to wholesale business. After a decade, we started our first retail store at Ongole, Andhra Pradesh. I always wanted to expand our family business to such an extent that we could map the entire nation with our presence. But this task requires mammoth investment and herculean managerial skills to carry out operations. With the booming emergence of ecommerce,OyeKitchen.com was conceptualised to serve Indian women with wide range of quality products which are sourced from different parts of world.
Our aim is to make a structured kitchen store which is currently not there in India. For other products such as apparel, beauty care products, shoes, groceries etc. you have a very organised and planned sector. But, kitchen segment lacks in that department and lot needs to be done to come parallel with other segments. So, we started to create a chain of outlets which focuses on only kitchenware. We wanted people to recall OyeKitchen whenever they needed any product for kitchen. Exploring the offline segment, we have recently floated our first exclusive outlet in Bangalore. After receiving the positive response from our customers, now we are aiming to expand our presence across the country.

Is the company bootstrapped or you raised funds from external sources?
OyeKitchen is a bootstrapped venture.​

How has OyeKitchen set a benchmark in the market with its products?
We sell all exclusive products which are used in kitchen. All products are sourced from different parts of the country. Each and every product is of high quality and comes with a full guarantee. All our products focus on reducing the effort of cooking, preparing and baking. We import many innovative kitchen tools which makes it easy for women to prepare food.​ Our products are priced economically and prepared with best quality.

How did you visualise this industry to be your chief domain?
Since we are serving this sector from past five decades, we know how big the market is. If you can see, the market size is about 700cr for kitchen appliances, 17000cr for cookware, 400cr for kitchen accessories, 6000cr for modular kitchen according to 2014-15 stats and it is increasing by 21 per cent year-on-year. So, we can see there is a wide opportunity to have a good success in this domain. Among these numbers, only 35 per cent of business is organised, so, we focus more on converting the unorganised market to organised one. ​

What are the major strategies adopted by you to attain your targeted customer base?
Initially, we have done many marketing campaigns to reach customers. ​ We advertised on radio, News paper, broadcast media etc. But, digital marketing is a good strategy to reach the targeted audience.

Which are the best selling products on your portal?
We have more than 1500 sku's which are from Oyekitchen umbrella, these are the one's which we source from other parts of world. Other than this, we have around 5000 sku's from different domestic brands. ​Now we are actually expanding our business model of selling both domestic products and our products to selling only our exclusive products.

What makes your online kitchenware shop unique?
Our wide range of products, exclusiveness, pricing, easy navigation for products and speed of delivery makes our services unique.​

How has been the consumer response so far?
We were rated 4.5 out of 5 in all the feedbacks received from our customers. We have more than 70000 followers on Facebook. Till now, company has processed around 20,000 orders, in which 40 per cent of orders are from repeated customers. This shows that our customers are happy with our product quality and pricing.​

There is a perception among the masses that physical shopping is always realistic. How have you altered this opinion?
Yes, this is the main problem what all the e-commerce companies are facing. But, I will give you an example of apparel; people thought that apparel will not sell in online segment as it has many points which have to be checked like size, fitting, quality of fabric etc. But apparently, this category is selling like hot cakes than any other product online.
So, there is no point of thinking for a physical touch. As a reason, we are also coming up with our chain of stores to give touch and feel of our products. Once, if customers analyse the quality of our products, then automatically they will start buying from online too.

What differentiates your brand as compared to your competitors?
I Quality
II Price
III Variety
IV Range of Products​

How do you manage logistics to increase the turnaround time?
We tied up with many logistic partners to deliver our products. According to the pincode, our system selects which delivery partner can deliver the shipment. Once that’s done, we begin sending products through them. All the stocks are stored in our central warehouse, so there won’t be any delay in procurement also.

Kindly share your expansion plans in terms of Pan India presence?
We are spreading our franchise outlets pan India; we are having a target of having 50 outlets by the end of this financial year. ​

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