Retail-as-a-service (RaaS) implies creating capsule experiences in physical spaces to focus on consumer service, not just the sale, and how small format traditional retailers can compete in an impactful way with organized retail formats, big box retailers & other e-commerce giants.

The concept emanates from the idea that as consumer expectations & aspirations shift, consumers are looking to feel something when they interact with a brand. Experience, emotion and connection are the driving forces; online shopping may have increased convenience, but it’s decimated the pleasure factor. Food & FMCG Brands are targeting offline retail platforms for fortifying retail width & depth. RAAS is all about re-imagination of the traditional department store; where multiple retailers promote their products in the shared retail space. The difference is that rather than a focus on stock management and the hard-sell, these stores are all about the immersive brand experience. There are fewer products on the shelves but there’s beefed up retail storytelling and the staff are more ‘actor’ than ‘assistant’. Being able to narrate a story that resonates with your brand and delights your customers is one of the new ways that companies resorting to for scale.

These are consumer product companies and brands who have reached a rooftop of their growth via purely digital means and are looking for outreach platforms to shift their business model into the physical space without the overheads that setting up a store would traditionally incur.

It’s not just D2C retailers who are benefiting from this new approach. Food & FMCG Product Manufacturers are also taking advantage of the customer insights that they can gain from residency. By dealing directly with their consumers for the first time, manufactures can see how consumers interact with their products and what pain points they might be experiencing. Those data points then enable them to go away and improve the products in response; those are opportunities that they might not have been able to take advantage of before.

The rationale for developing physical spaces for Food & FMCG Brands comes from the very real consumer need to ‘touch, taste and feel’. Consumer behaviour studies show that consumers combine on and offline behaviour before making purchase decisions; from researching consumer reviews to usage instructions or price comparisons, there is almost always an amalgamation of both worlds leading to an omnichannel & seamless shopper experience.

The platform that Kirana King is offering is perfectly positioned to enable & empower the food & FMCG brands to focus entirely on connecting with their consumers. By creating space for immersive and meaningful consumer experiences, they scale back on time formerly spent on distractions of stock management or scheduling systems. For the pure play online retailers, who have appeared in their droves, over the last couple of years, these ‘pop up’ type organized retail spaces provide a platform from which to increase brand loyalty and translate their commerce advance into the physical world.

Kirana King had realized this massive gap in the overall grocery retail business process in the unorganized grocery retail sector that still amounts to more than 95% of the available market size, they started building their product of RaaS in Jaipur from August 2018 and soon sculpted a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) without even realizing that they have turned around and transformed some 30 odd franchise stores to their retail network in the form of “Kirana King – India Ki Nayi Dukaan” within a short span by Jan 2019. The receptivity of RaaS-based interventions at these Kirana Stores in Jaipur gave the team much confidence and the sheer willingness of the Kirana store franchise partners to adopt, adapt and acknowledge the difference that these RaaS practices bought to their franchise store operations.