What It Takes to Build India’s Next Big D2C Brand? | Ankur Gupta, IGP & Interflora

A plane full of flowers was grounded three days before the wedding

Ankur Gupta is COO of Join Ventures, which owns IGP, Interflora India and Masqa. He explains why a business built on emotion ends up being a business built on cold rooms.

The flowers were already loaded when the aircraft developed a technical fault. Arranging a replacement took 24 hours, which removed one of the two days the team had to condition and install them. Nobody could move the wedding.

So they used the delay as planning time. Before the shipment landed they had mapped which box went where, put colour-coded stickers on every carton and organised a human chain to move them. Two days of work went into one. The guests arrived while the team was still clearing up.

"In gifting there is no margin of error. Everyone wants an experience, and there are emotions attached to it."

A pen you can return, and a pen you can’t

Ankur came to IGP when it acquired ArtisanGilt, the handicrafts and fashion jewellery business he co-founded after IIT Bombay and a stint at Bank of America. That was over a decade ago.

The insight that reshaped the company arrived around 2016. If you buy a pen for yourself and it comes late or broken, you refund it. If that pen was a gift for your father with his name engraved on it, there is nothing to refund. It had to arrive on that day, with the engraving right. Gifting, he realised, cannot be outsourced, because you cannot outsource accountability for someone else’s moment.

So he became one of his own vendors

IGP was fulfilling flowers through a vendor network across India, and the complaints were about substitution. A customer ordered red roses and pink carnations; a vendor sent whatever flowers were available, on the reasonable view that flowers had been delivered.

Rather than keep sending training material, Ankur set up as a vendor himself. He hired a couple of florists who went to the mandi each morning, built bouquets at a warehouse in Parel, and delivered nearby. It worked fine, which was confusing. Then the flowers he had over-bought started spoiling, and a variety he needed wasn’t at the market on the day an order came in. That is when the vendors’ problem became legible.

Eighty fulfilment centres, and everything made to order

The conclusion was to own it. Join Ventures now runs close to 80 captive fulfilment centres across India, and everything is made against an order: bouquets, personalised products, hampers, and cakes, where the base is ready but the icing and the name go on fresh. Ankur believes they are among very few companies in India baking to order daily.

That model is also what allows the range to be strange. Fusion products like motichoor laddoo cakes and rasmalai cakes only happen because production is in-house. And their actual proposition, he argues, is combining heterogeneous categories: a flower, a cake, a personalised object, a photograph and a utility item arriving as one gift. Anyone can deliver one category quickly. Assembling six is the hard part.

Building a flower supply chain that didn’t exist

Interflora is a UK company more than a century old. Its origin is a good piece of trivia: in 1923 an order placed in one city was transmitted by telegraph to a florist in another, which is arguably the first remote delivery of anything.

When it came to India in 2017, the team travelled to the UK and Holland and found the Indian flower supply chain decades behind on cold chain. So they went to the source. They now work directly with growers, run conditioning centres with large cold rooms including one near Bangalore, and specify what gets planted. Properly cold-chained, Ankur says, most flowers hold 10 to 15 days. When imports stopped during COVID they got Indian growers producing hydrangeas and other varieties they had been importing. One baby-pink Sweet Avalanche rose became so associated with the brand that growers around Bangalore now call it the Interflora rose.

Buying every rakhi the artisans could make

In March 2020, as the pandemic news started, the team went to their artisan partners with an unusual offer: whatever you can make, we will buy. Warehouses were shut and Raksha Bandhan was months away, but the bet was that a year when nobody could travel would be an enormous year for rakhis.

It was. IGP now delivers more than a million rakhis in a season, shipping to 150 countries.

Mother’s Day is as big as Valentine’s Day

The order volumes are comparable, but Valentine’s complaint rates run at roughly twice the level, partly because Valentine’s is a week rather than a day, starting with Rose Day on 7 February, and partly because people are more finicky about gifts for partners than for mothers. Mother’s Day is the harder operation: it falls in May, and getting fresh flowers through north Indian heat is a nightmare.

Peaks run 10 to 20 times a normal day. Planning for Valentine’s starts in November, with rose sourcing blocked with growers in October and November, cold trucks parked outside stores as overflow storage, and seasonal staff hired and trained a month ahead. Geographically, Punjab surprised them most, Chandigarh especially, along with Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar.

The wedding business came out of waste

The events arm started as a solution to a problem. In the early Interflora days they were importing premium flowers for a small number of consumer orders, and the unsold stems were spoiling. So they began supplying five-star hotels, then luxury weddings, where the design capability could be used properly.

It has since covered some of the largest celebrations in the country, including the Anant Ambani wedding and the Jamnagar events. For one earlier wedding they bought every available stem of Vanda orchid in Holland, flew in what amounted to a plane of flowers, lined up cold containers at the airport and built cold rooms at the venue holding four degrees.

Thirty minutes, personalised, in 26 cities

Speed has changed expectations, but Ankur will not accept that faster is automatically better. A cake that arrives in 30 minutes damaged is still a failed gift. So they have put people and machines inside the dark stores, and can deliver a personalised product in 30 minutes across 26 cities.

The decisions behind that are unromantic: catchment demand, rent, competing dark stores nearby, whether the location will be profitable. New products launch from larger warehouses and ship conventionally first, distributing to the network only once the data supports it. His advice to anyone entering gifting is to own the experience, then pick your battles rather than trying to solve everything, which he says he learned the hard way.

Listen to the full conversation with Ankur Gupta on FyndOutWithRagini.