Launched in 2011, Redmart Singapore is an online grocery retailer that provides a selection of more than 4,000: Design Thinking Case Study, NTU, Singapore

Launched in 2011, Redmart Singapore is an online grocery retailer that provides a selection of more than 4,000 groceries and home essentials to Singapore households. Roger Egan, founder and Chief Executive Officer has aspirations for RedMart to be like e-commerce giants, Amazon and eBay one day. The company sees itself as a logistics and technology company and its mission is to be the “eBay for consumer packaged goods manufacturers”.

What started out as a business targeting the expatriate crowd has changed over time. By 2015, three-quarters of its customers were locals, working professionals, mainly women between 25 and 44 years old, and were likely to be millennials and Gen-X Singaporeans who shopped both online and offline (Nielsen, 2015).

Fast forward to 2016, RedMart has more than 20,000 items on its online shopping site. It has launched the RedMart Relay service that provides personal shopping services for consumers who want hot meals, household items, or electronic goods delivered to their homes within one hour of ordering.

Although RedMart appears to have enjoyed rapid growth in a short span of time, it is still a young start-up company facing direct competition from bigger supermarkets and other online competitors. Despite its aggressive marketing efforts and investment in technology, RedMart’s chief executive, Roger Egan notes that many Singaporeans still prefer grocery shopping at supermarkets and wet markets over shopping online.

RedMart needs to understand why these shoppers are not shopping with RedMart and have to find ways to persuade the shoppers to shop with RedMart. What else can RedMart do to seek new opportunities for business growth and expansion in order to stay competitive?