Online baby care products retailer FirstCry.com has tied-up with around 500 maternity and general hospitals in Bangalore, including Motherhood Hospital, Apollo hospital, Isis Mother & Child Care Hospital and Manipal Hospital, for the FirstCry gift box programme. This gift box contains products like diapers, lotions, baby wipes, etc. and is delivered to a new mother right after she delivers. The Pune-based company has similar tie-ups with over 6000 hospitals across 25 cities in the country. The company claims that currently it delivers 7500 such boxes every month, and that over 2 lakh FirstCry boxes have already been delivered. According to Motherhood Hospital’s senior manager Kaushik Sur, the hospital already gives out around 200 FirstCry gift boxes every month. Firstcry’s gift box programme is almost identical to what Lapis Marketing-operated BabyBox.in offers. BabyBox also hands over sample baby care products “to parents of new born babies at hospitals and maternity centers". The company claims to have tied-up with over 5000 hospitals in 40 cities and that it delivers 1 lakh boxes to new parents through its offline sampling platform every month. Note that Lapis Marketing had acquired BabyBox from Snapdeal owner Jasper Infotech in 2012. Lapis Marketing also used to operate FirstCry competitor Hushbabies.com, which shut down its operations in October 2013. Increasing offline presence: Earlier this year, Firstcry had revealed plans of increasing the number of its offline franchise stores to 100 by setting up 30 new stores by end of 2014. The company had also claimed that it will…
