Jabong hosts design hackathon

Jabong.com; India’s leading online fashion destination on saturday hosted a design hackathon at its headquarters. The hack was part of constant innovation that Jabong is driving to incredibly improve customer experience. The design hack included some of the best product designers, engineers and experienced logistics players from across genres to come together and disrupt the existing courier bag which is used to deliver products. With around 25-30 participants, split into four different teams, the hack finally emerged with top three new prototypes which are more efficient and improves the last mile customer experience. Pratik Gupta, Director, Operations, Jabong, Anirudh Sharma Innovator, MIT Media Labs, Boston and Vijay Ghadge, COO, Go JaVAS comprised of the Jury.

The idea behind the design hack emerged from Jabong’s pro-active engagement to a tweet by a customer talking about over-sized bags being carried by the courier teams which deliver for e-commerce firms. Though this is a challenge for the courier delivery (logistics) companies, Jabong decided to take lead and crowd-source innovation on an improved design which is more efficient, easier to carry and fashionable!

Speaking on the occasion of this unique event, Jabong Co-Founder and Managing Director, Praveen Sinha said, “Our team is inspired to constantly innovate and push the boundaries to emerge with incredible customer experience. We are constantly making our processes more efficient to build the best and the biggest fashion destination in India. Last mile delivery is important. Our intention is to evolve the entire ecosystem and create more customer WOWs. WE are committed to lead the way to better working conditions across the sub-continent’s vast supply chain. The design hack is a step towards crowd-sourcing innovation to push the boundaries and evolve the e-commerce ecosystem. With this initiative and many more to come, we would like to engage our customers in a deeper relationship.”

Though hackathons are a new platform being tried rapidly across the country and the world they have been so far limited to technology. This is a first of its kind hackathon being attempted by an online fashion company. The intent was to solve a physical world challenge with a unique design solution by crowd-sourcing ideas with amazing creative and talented people.
The prototypes created today were the result of a collaborative effort involving designers, orthopedicians, product designers, innovators, mentors and engineers. Jabong will work with the winning teams to build their designs into actual prototypes and assess if it truly makes the life of the delivery person and finally the customers easy and efficient.

Jabong has been named India’s first company to achieve Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Foundation Membership. Jabong’s management is committed to lead the way to better working conditions across the sub-continent’s vast supply chain.A large part of Jabong’s businessare the people who deliver, who take calls, who work at the warehouses.

Courier services have had to evolve in the last 2-3 years for serving e-commerce. The fast turn-around-times, different sized packages, time scheduling of deliveries, Cash collection on delivery and increasing service expectations at the doorstep are aspects attached to the delivery part, which was not an expectation pre e-commerce. All these are very recent and every delivery company is currently focusing on them and improving.

A customer tweet led Jabong to this brilliant opportunity to look at things differently and see how this can lead to an incredible customer experience. This will not be a one off initiative and the company is keen to further listen to and engage customers across social platforms and innovate. Jabong is always excited to work with un-conventional thinkers and doers and willkeep co-creating amazing experiences.