Infrastructure alone cannot solve the volatility of festive demand, so Hexalog has tailored its operating routines to absorb sharp order spikes. During the season, the company designates special cross-dock lanes for high-velocity SKUs and allocates extra labour to these belts, ensuring that cartons flow through the building without pause, writes Utkarsh Tripathi, Co-Founder & Cheif Operating Officer(COO), Hexalog.
India’s shopping calendar peaks between Onam and New Year, and each year that window grows wider than the metro markets that once defined it. Rising disposable income, cheaper mobile data, and the promise of same-week delivery have drawn millions of shoppers in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets such as Jaipur, Coimbatore, Hubballi, and Siliguri into the online and organised retail fold. Brands see the result in order dashboards that light up well beyond the big six cities, yet their legacy networks still channel most inventory through metros like Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru. During the festive rush, this imbalance shows: fulfilment times slip, discounts evaporate in transit costs, and marketing campaigns lose momentum just when consumer intent is highest outside the metros. Hexalog, a logistics partner that already excels in customs clearance and urban last-mile, has turned its focus to this gap. The company is building storage and delivery networks that move the centre of gravity closer to Tier-2 and Tier-3 demand, so that festive offers reach every pin code with the same speed and reliability that metro shoppers now take for granted.
Regional Capacity Building
The backbone of Hexalog’s new plan is physical capacity distributed with surgical precision. Earlier this year, the company opened a 48,000-square-foot Value-Added Centre on the outskirts of Bengaluru. While the city remains a metro in every sense, the facility has been positioned to act as a spoke as much as a hub. All southbound inbound freight passes through its doors, but only a fraction stays within the city; the larger share is repacked, scanned, and sent onward to smaller centres like Mysuru, Madurai, and Vijayawada. The location was chosen after a lane-by-lane study of highway quality, middle-mile transit times, and driver availability, ensuring that late-night departures hit early-morning receiving docks at distant retail parks. Similar assessments are underway for the east and north, where Hexalog will replicate the model in Kolkata and Lucknow before the next peak. Each site is large enough to stage multi-client inventory yet compact enough to remain agile, avoiding the gridlock that can plague older mega-warehouses.
Value-Added Centre Model
A Value-Added Centre is more than extra square footage. It is a node where inventory is not only stored but also upgraded for the shelf or the doorstep. Inside Bengaluru’s new building, cross-dock conveyors link inbound docks directly to outbound lanes, so high-velocity stock bypasses static storage completely. Adjacent to the conveyors, kitting cells combine individual items into festive gift packs, while dedicated tables handle packaging and labelling that must comply with different state regulations. Another section carries out refurbishment and pre-shipment quality checks, allowing returned or slightly damaged goods to be repaired, inspected, and cleared without ever leaving the regional network. Because each of these activities happens under one roof, brands can forward-stock common components, customise them at short notice, and still make same-week departures for distant Tier-3 addresses. The centre, therefore, acts as both buffer and accelerator, cutting total dwell time even as it widens product variety.
Surge-Ready Operations
Infrastructure alone cannot solve the volatility of festive demand, so Hexalog has tailored its operating routines to absorb sharp order spikes. During the season, the company designates special cross-dock lanes for high-velocity SKUs and allocates extra labour to these belts, ensuring that cartons flow through the building without pause. Inside storage aisles, wave picking software groups orders by route, carrier, and promised delivery date; this sequence reduces picker travel and lines up inventory in the exact order that trucks will load. Slotting algorithms review velocity data each night and move fast movers closer to dispatch doors, a step that pays dividends when deals change every twenty-four hours. Refurbishment and quality-control teams receive a mirrored surge roster, so returned or defective units are processed before they snowball into backlog. Once cartons clear the exit scan, a routing engine matches them to line-haul capacity bound for Tier-2 and Tier-3 clusters, balancing speed, cost, and on-time performance in real time.