A grocery app has an awkward assignment. It must contain something like a supermarket while feeling nothing like the exhausting business of walking around one. Rice belongs somewhere. So does a television. The shopper would prefer to find both without learning how the retailer organises its departments. Somewhere between the catalogue and the checkout, a software problem becomes a problem of human patience.
- Webandcrafts joins design, software development, and marketing in one services business.
- Its retail projects reach beyond the screen into search, payments, ordering, and loyalty.
- The useful lesson: follow the customer through the handoffs between teams.
Webandcrafts, the Kerala company that also calls itself WAC, worked on precisely this assignment for LuLu Hypermarket. Its project account describes a shopping app with voice search, barcode scanning, location settings, and an ordinary-looking cart. Ordinary is an achievement here. Every extra feature gives the customer another thing to understand.
01 / A supermarket in your pocket
The LuLu brief brought researchers, business analysts, designers, and developers into the same job. WAC describes the central challenge as keeping navigation simple while accommodating the retailer’s requirements. The app covered groceries, fresh food, electronics, lifestyle products, and home goods. It was built for native Android and iOS experiences.
This is a useful introduction to the company because it makes a vague industry phrase, digital transformation, unusually concrete. Someone wants dinner ingredients. Someone else has to connect the inventory, the interface, and the payment. A redesign earns its keep when those separate activities produce one completed order.
WAC’s business sits at those intersections. It offers branding and experience design, web and mobile engineering, cloud services, and digital marketing. The breadth matters when a client’s problem crosses departments. It also makes the company harder to describe with one familiar label. An advertising agency can bring people to a store. A development firm can build the store. WAC pitches responsibility across that journey.
02 / The first bottleneck was time
The company’s beginnings were smaller and more improvised. Abin Jose Tom was building websites while studying in Chennai before Webandcrafts established its Kerala office in 2012. In an early YourStory account, he described the difficulty of balancing classes and client work while competing against established firms. Design and after-sales attention became ways to win work.
In a later founder interview, the opening numbers were almost comically modest: ₹1,500 for a domain and server, followed by a first assignment paid in two ₹5,000 instalments. These are historical startup costs. Hiring a team to build an integrated retail system is a different purchase entirely.
Work eventually exceeded what Abin could deliver alongside classes, and designer Clint Antony joined the business. The proposed move also changed: Abin had considered staying in Chennai, but employees wanted to return to Kerala. The resulting Infopark base followed the people doing the work.
“Leave everything better than how it was.”WAC’s published definition of ownership
03 / Follow the order behind the counter
The Caribou Coffee Kuwait project takes the argument further. The client wanted direct mobile ordering, loyalty rewards, and integration with existing systems. WAC’s case study describes a business concerned about the cost of relying on third-party delivery agents. The desired change involved the customer relationship and the economics of fulfilling it.
The resulting app launched in January 2024. WAC reports that the share of orders placed through the app reached 33%. That is a supplier-reported result, with no claim here that the same outcome follows from every branded app. The integration work is the more useful detail: point-of-sale connections, order management, rewards, and tools for the people handling incoming purchases.
Share of orders placed through the app, as reported in WAC’s project account.
LuLu Exchange reveals another kind of friction. WAC describes regional requirements that needed reconciling, repeated technical reconfiguration, and backend logic that had allowed spam errors. Its account says the rebuilt website improved data retrieval and customer-query responses. The visible website was one layer of a repair involving less photogenic plumbing.
04 / Selling the connection
The commercial arrangement is recognisable professional services. WAC’s partnership process describes requirements gathering, account management, proposals, and either fixed-project or hourly billing. It also works with agencies through outsourcing and resource augmentation. A client can buy a defined project or additional delivery capacity.
That places WAC among digital agencies and software consultancies competing for business technology budgets. Its argument is the convenience of connected disciplines. Whether that is valuable depends on the brief. A business needing a straightforward brochure website has fewer coordination problems than a retailer connecting a large catalogue, store operations, and repeat purchases.
The distinction helps a buyer ask better questions. Walk through one real order. Identify where it waits, where information gets entered twice, and who owns the correction when something goes wrong. Agree on a measurable outcome before discussing a visual refresh. This is an inference from the projects, and a practical way to evaluate the pitch.
05 / From client work to WAC Commerce
In 2024, Jilu Joseph became CEO while Abin moved into the managing director role. The company’s account describes an emphasis on organisational processes alongside international expansion. Its Washington office opened that June. A Google Cloud partnership, announced that November, added another relationship to its cloud and AI ambitions.
At its August 2025 WAC Beyond event, the company introduced WAC Commerce. The suite brings together commerce, AI-powered search, order and warehouse management, picker and delivery applications, loyalty, analytics, and marketing automation. The modules formalise the connections visible in its client projects.
The interesting test is how much coordination that combination actually removes. Software can connect the warehouse to the storefront; a business still has to maintain accurate stock and fulfil the promise on the screen. For a prospective WAC customer, the place to start is wonderfully unglamorous: choose one purchase and find the point where it becomes hard.