With a vision of establishing a brand that is trusted by people; Suman Howlader Founder & CEO, CarZippi aims at providing a complete automobile management system pan India. With this zeal CarZippi aspires to become the pioneers in Car-Care business
- Team Estrade: Please share with us the conception and growth of CarZippi?
Suman Howlader: We had a daily car cleaning service where an individual comes to your home and cleans your car every day morning. If you have tried similar services, you will know that they just use the same piece of cloth to clean 30-40 cars every day, not properly cleaned and probably it contains the dirt from the previous car as well. It results in swirl marks on your car as well as light scratches. Needless to say, you never have that feeling that your car was even cleaned. So, we had to let him go. Now, faced a new challenge, whenever I had to go out, I had to travel in a dirty car. I could not clean my car myself due to time factor. I searched on Google if there were any doorstep services to clean my car. I could not find any provider who does it in a professional way and search results were more of aggregators rather than providers. With aggregators, the problem is accountability of the service. Aggregator says, that service provider is accountable and the service provider says, speak to the aggregator since the order was through aggregators. As a customer, it’s a bad experience and dead end. Spoke to quite a few friends and neighbours if they had any references for mobile car wash services. To my surprise, the problem which I was facing was in fact faced by them too. So, decided to take it up as a viable and organized business and make life easier for car owners. Here, we take orders and we fulfil orders ourselves, so, the complete accountability is ours. This is how CarZippi was born.
The growth prospect is very encouraging and fast paced. Currently, the market is very fresh and there is hardly any presence of similar service providers. With the growth of ecommerce and preference for doorstep services, we see a multi-fold growth for CarZippi in this segment.
- Team Estrade: What products/services does CarZippi offer?
Suman Howlader: Established in 2015, CarZippi is a Bangalore-based organisation that aims to deliver affordable, high-quality doorstep car-care solutions that includes car wash, car polish and detailing services through a unique blend of technology and on-ground expertise. With a vision to establish a brand that is trusted by people, partners and customers alike, the company aims to establish itself as the market leader in the car care and automobile industry.
- Team Estrade: What’s your approach to continuous business improvement?
Suman Howlader: We are continuously working on improving our platform and actual service which is car care, to enhance the user experience ultimately resulting in customer retention. Quality assurance is important to us. At the same time, we are engaged in target marketing activities for market expansion and penetration. So, for business expansion, we are looking at both new market penetration and growth recurring customer footfall. In terms product, we are continuously in the lookout for latest technologies and incorporating them into our service offerings. We are looking at 360 degree business improvement.
“CarZippi aims to deliver affordable and high-quality car-care solutions at your doorstep”
- Team Estrade: How will you differentiate your brand with competitors?
Suman Howlader: There is no known competition in the market as such in this segment as this is a very niche area. In a way, CarZippi is a pioneer in the area. The close ones are the likes of 3M Car care which is again into brick and mortar model. Then there is Urban Clap, timesavers, Cartisan etc. who are more of an aggregator fulfilling their orders through affiliates and individual professionals. Here at CarZippi, we ourselves own the whole order end to end i.e. orders raised with CarZippi are fulfilled by CarZippi. We take ownership and accountability of the whole order.
This is good and bad for us as this open up the opportunity for us towards a quick market penetration and at the same this creates the challenge in product placement as we need to educate the mass about the concept and win the trust as well.
- Team Estrade: Logistically speaking, how challenging is car-care business?
Suman Howlader: The biggest challenge of today in the automobile maintenance and car care segment is the transparency towards the pricing, quality assurance and time consumption or turnaround time in getting one’s car serviced. To address these issues, we have built in a robust business process in the tool itself to provide clarity in terms of pricing. A customer will have the visibility to the costs for every item and plan his service bucket based on his budget or vice versa. As we are fulfilling the orders ourselves, we have complete control on the delivery quality. We train skilled automotive professionals on the best practices, soft skills and use of latest technologies while in filed helps us to maintain an edge on the quality. We are also ISO 9001-2008 certified. With respect to turnaround time, we take the service to the customer’s doorsteps, thereby reducing the turnaround time. The customer need not spend time to take the car to the garage, then leave it there in a queue for servicing and go back to pick it up once done. This way, the customer may spend almost half a day to get a car washed & polished. With CarZippi, the customer can book a service at their location and at their convenient time reducing the time consumption to 30 mins to an hour max or the customer can utilize this time doing something else or with his family while we work on his car at his garage. It’s more convenient, transparent and secure.
“Biggest challenge today is the transparency towards the pricing, quality assurance in Car Care”
- Team Estrade: Given the competition and current car-care market scenario, how do you forecast your business?
Suman Howlader: Under current market scenario, the biggest challenge of today in the automobile maintenance and car care segment is the transparency towards the pricing, quality assurance and time consumption or turnaround time in getting one’s car serviced. We are solving both these problem with the blend of latest technologies, strong business process, strict quality assurance and skilled professionals who deliver the service. We are also ISO 9001-2008 certified.
The growth prospect is very encouraging and fast paced. Currently, the market is very fresh and there is hardly any presence of similar service providers. With the growth of ecommerce and preference for doorstep services, we see a multi-fold growth for CarZippi in this segment.
- Team Estrade: Which is the most productive state or area for expansion?
Suman Howlader: Currently we are in Bangalore and have rollout plans for 6 major cities of India shortly. We feel Bangalore & Mumbai has the potentials for most productive state for this segment.
- Team Estrade: Where do you see CarZippi in the next five years? What are your future plans?
Suman Howlader: The long term goal is to transform CarZippi to offer a complete automobile management system to end users across India. In short term, have plans to expand our service offerings to our consumers and increase the number of service vans to reduce the turnaround time form booking to fulfilment within 30 minutes from current 60 minutes. In 5 years, we see ourselves as market leader in most tier 1 and tier 2 cities in India with more than 50% market share.
Taking services to the customer’s doorsteps: CarZippi
