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Agritech platform Gramophone said it plans to expand its offline retail network to 10,000 stores countrywide by the end of September this year. The company, which launched offline retail this year, has 5,000 stores in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, western Uttar Pradesh, and eastern Maharashtra. While some of the stores are owned and operated by Gramophone, the majority are under partnership with existing agri-retailers, the company said.
“We have taken an omni-channel approach to cross to the next orbit of growth. Our partner stores act as Gramophone’s offline touchpoints and GramKonnect, our retailer app, as the online touchpoint. We’re doubling the number of our stores this fiscal year, which, in turn, also expands the size of our online network. Since the first 5,000 stores helped our monthly business grow at the rate of 100 per cent month-on-month within a month, we confidently anticipate the additional stores will help us achieve five-fold growth and grow our overall gross merchandise value to ₹1,000 crore in FY23,” Tauseef Khan, co-founder and CEO of Gramophone, said in a statement.
The store owners will use GramKonnect, an app launched by Gramophone in April 2022, to buy seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and agricultural hardware tools and equipment. Gramophone says it has trained the agri-entrepreneurs to assist farmers in selecting products and provide agronomy advice.
“There is a dire need to support the small retailers in the remotest parts of India as they struggle to run their businesses. Local wholesalers barely provide any service to them and quote rates that eat into the retailer’s already hair-thin margins. Moreover, access to branded products is frequently beyond the reach of these small retailers due to their size, as large manufacturers do not have the wherewithal to work with them directly. GramKonnect aims to support them by solving these basic pain points and connecting them with the latest technology,” Tauseef said.
The app allows the retailers to view the prices and eligible schemes for each product across different brands, bringing in much-needed transparency in this space and enabling farmers to benefit from the available offers and discounts, a company statement said.
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