Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It’s Aayush here for Trade Tricks this week. 

Open any hyperlocal delivery app and you’re likely to see some cute messaging pop up on your screen. Usually instances of that platform going above and beyond to deliver convenience to its users. Messages I saw on Dunzo, for instance, spoke of how the company has helped deliver mother’s milk for a baby across the city, and medicines during the Covid lockdowns. 

In fact, I am reminded of a conversation I had with Kabeer Biswas, Dunzo’s CEO and co-founder, back in November 2021. The idea with Dunzo, he told me, was to deliver convenience. Basically, any product or service which, when made available in a short period of time, made your life easier. 

Dunzo isn’t the only one that’s gone after that goal. There’s another business that has often displayed an ability to throw surprise contenders (some of which were genuine head-scratchers) into the convenience sweepstakes. 

Way back in 2015, when it was still called Grofers and hadn’t been acquired by Zomato, BlinkIt was delivering gold and silver coins during the festive season. Here is a little Twitter post I found from back then.

That same year, it delivered iPhones at midnight during the launch of the iPhone 6S, giving its users an alternative to spending hours in long queues outside their closest Apple retailers. In August last year, it launched quick printouts—black and white at Rs 5, colour at Rs 19. Many were appreciative, but I also remember Twitter being flooded with memes about how high the prices were. And just a couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how it was looking to foray into the home services category. 

But all of BlinkIt’s forays into these very disparate sectors have had one common proposition—convenience delivered quickly. 

Which is exactly what it’s planning to do now in an entirely new category. It’s something of a head scratcher at first glance, but one for which BlinkIt is building a whole new infrastructure: 

Beauty and cosmetics.

New ground again

If you live in Sector 43, Gurgaon, and are a BlinkIt user, you probably see something like this when you open the app now:

If you click that red tile on the bottom right, you’ll be looking at a plethora of beauty product listings from well-known brands such as Lakme and Maybelline.