Redmart Co-Founder: Foundation First, One Step At A Time

We recently wrote about Redmart.com, a one-stop shop to purchase non-perishables in Singapore, which attracted investment from Skype co-counder and angel investor Toivo Annus. The site makes shopping for household goods a lot easier, especially for busy bees who do not have private transport to help bring bulky items home. I love the idea of cutting out the middleman retailers (which Redmart does), but more importantly, I appreciate the efforts and thought processes put forth by the co-founders running this business.

At a glance, Redmart looks like an aggregator of most of the non-perishable household products from various manufacturers, listing them on their website for people to purchase. However if you dive deeper, this online business is rather labor and logistics intensive – from holding the goods within its warehouse, packing and sending to various households within a reasonable time frame. The team needs to ensure they are able to handle the backend infrastructure extremely well (such as the inventory system and accounting system) before being able to deliver the products to people. That really must take a great deal of effort!

Often people tend to be more concerned about their front-end infrastructure – whether or not a web store or business is pleasant to the eye or user-friendly. But as much as building a excellent front-end improves the online shopping experience, in my opinion, the accompanying offline machinations that come before and after may even be more impressive.

I also like that Redmart values user feedback, allowing users to suggest products they hope to see on the site. Reminders can also be created upon checkout so busy folks will get email notifications on replenishing their household items.

The company’s co-founder Roger Egan has stated, “We’re focused on delivering happiness to people.” Let’s hope the team will be able to deliver happiness to even more cities in the near future.