Future scales down e-commerce ops, lays off staff across functions
BENGALURU: Kishore Biyani-led Future Group has scaled down its e-commerce venture, ‘Retail 3.0’, and laid off around 350-400 employees, four people aware of the development said on condition of anonymity.
Two former senior employees, who were recently fired, said the layoffs across roles in sales, product development, marketing and ground operations were carried out in the last few months. Future Group recently shuttered many of its EasyDay stores, amid little traction for its EasyDay grocery app.
The closure of 140 EasyDay stores in November, which was reported by The Economic Times, was part of the same restructuring exercise, said the first of the two people cited above.
While announcing Future Group’s e-commerce strategy in 2017, Biyani had stressed on blending technology with his existing physical stores. “The idea was to convert the entire offline journey of a Future Group consumer into the online world,” the second person said.
A Future Group spokesperson confirmed the scaling down and layoffs without disclosing details.
Towards the end of 2016, the retail firm began hiring to build digital assets to support a new e-commerce strategy. Biyani unveiled the ‘Retail 3.0’ initiative at a Nasscom Product Conclave in November 2017. By 2018, it had nearly 500-600 employees building different digital assets for Retail 3.0. In November 2018, e-commerce giant Amazon bought a 9.5% stake worth ₹2,500 crore in Future Group.
In January, Amazon and Future said Amazon India will become the authorized online sales channel for Future Retail Ltd stores and Future Retail will ensure the participation of relevant stores on the Amazon India marketplace and its programmes.
Future Group announced a research and development unit named C&D Labs (Consumer and Digital) in Bengaluru in April 2017. “They (C&D Labs) were developing a map of the entire journey of a Future Group consumer…basically a psychographic analysis of the buyer. For example, if we knew the age and gender and marital status of the customer, we could figure what kind of products could be marketed to him or her from a pool of previous order history of similar customers,” said the first person.
By 2019, Future Group decided to pull the plug and massively scale down its digital strategy, due to the slowdown in retail spends and delays in proposed investments in the e-commerce venture.
According to the second person, C&D Labs, spun off from Future Consumer Pvt. Ltd, had around 150 employees.
Some of the fired employees were working on two key digital assets—storefront software for managing loyalty programmes at physical stores and a hyperlocal delivery app called EasyDay. The storefront software was built to ease on-boarding of customers to the loyalty programme priced at ₹999 per year.