How we helped the fast-growing women's footwear startup to structure their growth.
Client
About the Client
CAI is the brainchild of Aradhana & Dhanraj Minawala, two entrepreneurs who dared to take an unprecedented business stride, and shaped an extraordinary trend in the footwear industry. The CAI store was launched in 2015 with the sole purpose of providing non-leather footwear locally and globally to the trend-conscious at affordable prices.
The CAI Store has served more than 2,00,000 happy customers to date and has grown sixfold since March 2020.
Website: https://thecaistore.com/
Problem
With the fast-paced growth, the founders (Dhanraj Minawala and Aradhana Minawala) were stuck in the day-to-day operations and issue resolutions. With the anticipation of growth, the founders wanted to build a team and bring in some structure, systems and processes to sustain the growth more efficiently.
Project Timeline
October 2019 - March 2020
Project Title
How we helped a fast-growing women’s footwear startup to structure their growth
Approach and Findings
We went through a series of interactions with the management team in identifying the various bottlenecks and challenges where they were getting dragged and were spending time that could have been spent on business growth and expansion.
We bucketed the issues as Strategic, Operational and People related and bifurcated them as issues that impact growth and issues that have arisen due to lack of structure and capability development.
We understood every role from the Management and their expectations from those roles post which we interacted with the people manning those roles and understood their understanding of those roles and the challenges faced by them. This gave us clarity on whether the challenges were due to communication gaps, capability gaps or lack of intent from those individuals.
Work Done
Once we had the clarity we started working on challenges and issues that could be solved through Communication, Processes and Development of the team. We also created a structured Business Plan mapped to the Manpower Plan (helping the founders have clarity of when to hire which role along with Salary Benchmarking and role requirements).
We delivered the following during the project.
- 1. Detailed Job Descriptions for all roles (current and near-future basis of the Business and Manpower plan)
- 2. Documented existing processes and re-engineered them to bring more efficiency and automated processes that were critical to ensuring mistake proofing
- 3. Created checklists and process flows to provide people more clarity and minimize mistakes and rework
- 4. Communicated the Job Descriptions and Processes to all individuals and explained how these are going to help them improve their work and output and incorporated their inputs
- 5. Analysed business data and created an 18-month business plan along with a growth-mapped Manpower Planning
- 6. We recommended management to focus on building more best sellers and diversify into other categories like Heels
Outcome
The CAI Store has grown more than 6 times since we did the project with them in 2019-20. They introduced Heels within a few months of our recommendation and today Heels account for more than 40% of their sales. They have launched products in collaboration with Rhea Kapoor and Aashna Shroff respectively. The CAI Store launched its first retail store at the Pheonix Mall at Lower Parel, Mumbai.
Frameworks used in the project
Objective and Value Setting Framework
People & Culture Framework
Efficient Systems and Processes Framework
Testimonial
Aradhana Minawala
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