Published on Oct 30, 2022
On October 30th, Dubai Startup Hub hosted the 8th session of its networking series in partnership with Area 2071. The event welcomed our CEO Rayan Osseiran as a guest speaker to the event. The primary focus of the event was to share experiences in Delivery & Logistics. Rayan, having previously founded an e-commerce company, shared his experience in navigating the e-commerce landscape from manufacturing to storage and customer fulfilment.
In an answer to what made him focus more on Shorages rather than his first e-commerce company, Rayan responded with the following: "Developing my own e-commerce company made me realize two things; first, how easy it is in today's world to develop branded products, and second, how difficult it is to manage e-commerce logistics".
On the first note, Rayan recounted his trip to Guangzhou and Shenzhen where he had the opportunity to witness buildings filled with white-label product manufacturers. These manufacturers were providing sellers with the ability to buy in bulk anything from fashion to electronics while retaining their own label on it. What this means is that sellers with a brand can now stamp their logo on a larger variety of products. "This is driving and giving birth to a larger number of niche and boutique SME brands", said Rayan in his talk.
On the second note, Rayan expanded on the procurement, storage and fulfilment journey that e-commerce companies have to go through. "The first headache comes with importing the products, the second headache comes in finding a warehouse to store and fulfil the products from" said Rayan. "We found ourselves in trouble because we were considering the option of renting a warehouse and hiring people to do the picking, packing and delivery to customers - a very expensive option" he added.
Having recognized a gap in the market, Rayan decided to focus more on Shorages, a platform providing end to end storage and fulfilment services to local and international online sellers.
