KLOUDPaD: from building tablets to setting up a multi-brand online store
Aromal and Abbishek Shikky are the founders and partners in crime at KLOUDPaD Mobility Research. Based out of Kerala, this Startup Village incubatee has had an eventful journey. Aromal and Abbishek are brothers and both hold an MBA degree from Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent. Aromal has over eight years global experience as a business technology consultant and project delivery manager while Abbishek has marketing and operations experience. It was in 2010 when the startup bug bit them and they were ambitious enough to dive into the hardware business.
The initial team started a telecom engineering division in 2011 in collaboration with University of Greenwich, Kent. This research division is called meMMoo and is the core development effort in creating a shift to a more sustainable distributed wireless communication architecture for the future of telecom. Parallel to this, the brothers put in their own money and some investment from their family business to build a consumer electronics brand. The product design is supported by their alma mater while the manufacturing takes place in Hong Kong. KLOUDPaD has a range of tablets and over the years they have been able to sell more than 10,000 products in southern India.
KLOUDPaD has been associated with UKTI and the Startup Village. It was here when they realized the need to consolidate. “We focused our efforts in working on commercializing businesses in the electronics retail and building products in wireless mobility space,” says Aromal. Slatestore.in is the first product which is a mobile electronics focused etail brand of KLOUDPaD targeting the South Zone in India. “We are hoping to deliver the experience of multi-brand technology shopping to customers out of the city zone through web and mobile channels,” says Aromal.
The vision of Slatestore is to serve as an etail marketplace for offline retailers in South Zone across all consumer product verticals ('mobile electronics' currently). The competition is fierce for any e-commerce player entering the market but KLOUDPaD is not your typical e-commerce portal. The company has been able to build and sell hardware which is commendable and now has pivoted to broaden the scope with the online store.
