Furniture e-commerce company WoodenStreet is planning to expand its current warehousing capacity fivefold to a total of 5 million sq ft across India in the next 24-36 months.
The company is planning to invest around $5 million to support this supply-chain and warehousing expansion in addition to hiring 250-300 employees from logistics and supply-chain domain.
WoodenStreet recently launched its largest national warehouse in Jodhpur with an area of over 2.5 lakh sq ft. Currently, it maintains over 20 warehouses and distribution centers with a total area of 1 million sq ft spread across the country.
“At the core of this planned expansion, which sits at 5 million sq ft, we have set afoot a larger drive of broadening our business at the grassroots level,” said Lokendra Ranawat, CEO of WoodenStreet. “By augmenting our expansion to Make-in-India initiative, we plan to empower local artisans through our platform, enabling them to expand their trade horizons across the nation and making it easier for them to do business.”
To keep up with a high volume of logistics, the company has also upgraded its warehouses with the latest stacking technology and launched an in-house Warehouse Management System (WMS) app that ditches bar-code scanners and instead uses extremely-affordable and easily scalable QR-code technology, empowered through smartphones.
Founded in 2015, WoodenStreet offers affordable luxury furniture, décor and furnishings encompassing a network covering more than 300 cities through over 100 delivery hubs and over 25 experience stores.
Last year, the company had expanded its reach in West Bengal, Kerala and the Delhi-NCR by opening new experience stores. This year’s brick-and-mortar expansion is aimed at bringing its 2019 target of over 50 experience stores to an end, with a plan to reach over 100 stores across India in the next 36 months.