How Pantone started selling directly to consumers in 25 days with Eshopbox cross border ecommerce solution

About Pantone

Pantone provides a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers. More than 10 million designers and producers around the world rely on Pantone products and services to help define, communicate and control color for graphics, fashion and product design.

Pantone has two sets of customers — businesses and individuals. Their business customers are design agencies, institutes, corporate firms, and more. Their individual customers are students, architects, freelancers and more. Pantone was looking to build a partnership with an ecommerce partner who could help them cater to both sets of customers effectively.

‍

‍

Their first exposure to the challenges of going D2C

Pantone wanted to transition away from their traditional operational model in India which involved importing their products and then distributing them in wholesale. The team at Pantone knew that to unlock the full potential of the Indian market they would have to go direct-to-consumer.

To achieve this, Pantone wanted to outsource their ecommerce operations to a niche logistics provider with a deep understanding of the Indian ecommerce market. Sam Shalgaonkar is the regional manager for Pantone South East Asia, a part of his responsibility includes identifying business opportunities for the company's products in different market segments in South East Asian Markets.

He was looking to find a reliable company who could import their products and manage the entire product lifecycle — storage, distribution, fulfilment and payments.

‍

‍

Enter Eshopbox

Eshopbox offered Pantone a solution completely customised to their unique needs which directly addressed their pain point — which was adopting a new operational model to establish a strong online presence for their customers.

‍

The Eshopbox solution: More than just going D2C

• Registered Eshopbox as the importer on record for Pantone products and managed the entire operational life cycle — importing goods, storing inventory safely and fulfilling orders.
• Make Pantone products retail-compliant to sell to Indian consumers. This required labelling of Pantone products with Indian currency and inclusion of necessary information as per Indian meteorology act.
• Pantone products are made available on Amazon and Flipkart with A+ listings. A+ content refers to product description with enhanced image. This helped students, freelancers and designers make an informed purchasing decision.
• All the Pantone products were enabled with badges that instill trust and quality for customers i.e., Amazon Prime and Flipkart Assured.