Pre Cared, a baby product online shop, has received funding from India based seed fund MyFirstCheque. While there is a surge of baby products being sold online and offline and there is a general increase in the interest to capture the booming baby market, Pre Cared offers its products with a difference. Products sold by Pre Cared are used.

With a tagline of “Shop Smart, Shop Green” Pre Cared aims to do just that. The site lists the products down with a five star rating, indicating the used condition of the product. Lesser number of stars indicate that product is most used and higher number stars indicate that the product is hardly used.

What I Found

The product portfolio and the number of products available right now on its website are limited. For the products which are available they had a four star rating indicating that the products were hardly used but the price remained high for a used product. I haven’t done an apples to apples comparison but a used walker is being sold at Rs. 2199 ($44), which could be high. Again, I might be wrong.

What I Like

The site is a welcome addition to the world obsessed with possessions. Bringing up a kid in a world that is becoming increasingly materialistic has become very difficult. Kids want whatever their neighbors have. Keeping up with Joneses or Malhotras, now starts at a very young age.

Pre Cared promotes the concept of buying used. It’s not exactly renting like the p2p economy I have discussed earlier, but buying used products isn’t far behind. For toy, walker or a car seat which typically sees just one life now can get lucky and see two to three lives. This kind of recycling also promotes green thinking and is good for the environment.

In a way this is already happening offline. People post in apartment block notice boards that they have stroller or a walker for sale and interested people will buy it. Taking it online is the next logical step. Pre Cared has done just that. They might have to look at the price tags one more time to gain broader acceptance.

The Social Angle

In addition to being the green company it could be, Pre Cared, is trying to be a social enterprise too. It plans to donate the profits from the product sales to an option of users choice. I’m not sure how this works exactly but it reminds me of a similar initiative by textbuk.in which plants a tree for every book sold.

Will it Crawl?

In India, Online audience are generally considered to be affluent. There’s a taboo about buying second hand products in India. “If you can afford it, then better buy it” is the general mantra.

Given these two factors, would you be buying an used toy or a baby product of the apple of your eye?

Via Penn Olson

---

---

---