A Concierge Service For The Fussiest Customers

You can ask Ananya and Shweta Lodaya to procure you pretty much anything—organic quinoa, a venus fly trap, even a pair of “invisible” shoes—but don’t ask them to find you a maid or the sex tape of a certain Congress leader. “We draw the line there,” says Ananya Lodaya, who along with sister Shweta, runs Concierge India, an online service that prides itself on catering to the retail whims of its clients. The site, Conciergein.com, went live this month, and since then has built up a base of members who not only enlist the Lodaya sisters to find them things not easily available in India, but also to point them in the way of covetable items that they flash sell via their site (our current fave: a pair of red Hunter wellies). Ananya Lodaya, a Princeton and Harvard-educated grad who cut her teeth in the finance and the private equity world, says her sister and she started Concierge India when they realised you could find obscure, niche products here, provided you knew where to look. ”We just help people find vendors that already exist,” says Lodaya, who then puts her clients directly in touch with the retailer. Membership is free and clients are charged no hidden fees or costs other than what they pay for the service or item.

Their success rate, she reckons, is about 75 per cent. “Sometimes we’re not able to find certain things,” says Lodaya. “Someone wanted a pair of limited edition Roger Federer Nike shoes that were only released in the US. Another time, a woman who was in the advanced stages of cancer asked us to get her into a specialised research trial in Cuba but because of regulations and bureaucracy, we had to say no.” Among their hits are finding a fussy client a travel agent in Peru who could email her photos of bathrooms in the Amazon; and getting another member a pair of Rs2 lakh “invisible” shoes made of mirrors (see image).

For more information, visit Conciergein.com. Membership is free.