Despite being an engineer with no knowledge of gourmet food, sheer passion led Himanshu Chawla to launch the bakery brand Bakingo. Bakingo is the second business venture started by Himanshu Chawla, who also runs the prominent e-commerce venture FlowerAura with Shrey Sehgal. With 6+ years of experience in the online flower industry, he conceptualized Bakingo to redefine the cake-ordering experience, which has been cumbersome so far.
The Origin
Bakingo’s roots go back further than the bakery business itself.
Chawla started out as one of three engineering students, alongside Suman Patra and Shrey Sehgal, who met while pursuing their B.Tech at Netaji Subhas University of Technology in Delhi and shared a hostel. All three came from middle-class backgrounds, and after graduating and briefly working elsewhere, they reunited to launch Flower Aura in 2010, an online business selling flowers, cakes, and personalized gifts that, as Patra describes it, “began out of a basement setup in Gurugram.”
In the early days, because there was only one employee responsible for customer service, operations, and delivery, the founders often had to step in themselves. Sehgal recalls personally hand-delivering a large share of Valentine’s Day orders across Delhi-NCR in their first year.
Flower Aura made a good profit in its first year and has since grown steadily.
Soon, the founders saw the opportunity for Bakingo. Chawla shares: “At FlowerAura, 50% of our orders included cakes. We realized that cakes had become an indispensable part of celebrations, be it a small get-together at home, a birthday bash, farewell, or anniversary, or a grand corporate party.”
With that, Bakingo was launched in 2016 as a standalone brand under Bake Wish Pvt. Ltd., built on a cloud kitchen model designed to deliver consistent, high-end cakes across multiple cities.
Today, Chawla focuses on operations and growth, Sehgal on R&D and aggregator partnerships, and Patra on marketing.
In Conversation With Himanshu Chawla Of Bakingo
In an exclusive conversation with The Restaurant Times, Himanshu talks about the story of Bakingo, its services, USP, and much more.
Because, according to Chawla, “there are a lot of bakeries coming up, and cakes and bakery items are widely included in gift hampers. The Indian market still lacks a national bakery brand; some setups are emerging and are successful, but a pan-India bakery brand across cities has yet to be launched.”
USP Of Bakingo
With services such as same-day delivery, midnight delivery, and delivery within 3 hours, Bakingo aims to create a strong virtual presence, which will help in penetrating the target audience and then expanding into franchise stores that will make ordering cake online a hassle-free task.
“One of our main USPs is delivering freshly baked cakes within 3 hours; therefore, we are striving to build a strong delivery system of our own. We have also partnered with various delivery companies to accomplish this. Our endeavor at Bakingo is to deliver the best quality cakes to every doorstep, even at the eleventh hour. We want to establish Bakingo as a synonym for cakes,” says Chawla.
Role Of Website in Branding
According to Chawla, one only gets a single opportunity to make a first impression. With the attention span of people reducing, one literally has seconds to grab the attention of the patrons towards a website to increase the number of visitors and tell them what you’re all about.
High-quality pictures of the products on the website should be a priority. The website has to be designed in a way that the overall experience of the brand is conveyed. According to Chawla, whether you serve beautifully crafted dishes, have eye-catching decor, or your restaurant is located in a picturesque setting, showing off great pictures and videos enhances the chance to feature what is best about a brand. A website should be made in a way that helps the business to build a professional image, as it is an excellent approach for assisting customers to get acquainted with a brand.
Oven Efficiency Is The Key To Good Baking
The role of the oven in the baking process is quite obvious; however, it is often taken for granted.
In particular, when it comes to stoves, gas ranges provide a heat that is a lot easier to manage. When you turn the burner down, the flame recedes, causing the heat in the pan to drop immediately. When you turn off the burner on an electric range, the temperature of the burner has to drop naturally prior to the temperature level in the pan can decrease. It is really easy to overcook food on an electric range, and it takes a bit of getting used to before you can time things to perfection.
Importance of Staff Training
Staff training is key to a successful business. Proper training, especially for the delivery boys, is very important. With cakes, there is a constraint as a single delivery boy cannot carry more than two cakes to maintain their quality, so it is important to devise methods of delivery and train the staff accordingly.
According to Chawla, prior training is necessary, but the type of training and requirements vary depending on the kind of bakery. A well-trained member in a bakery will understand the basics of food preparation, sanitation, and food planning. Some brands also offer executive training programs, which will associate on-the-job experience with in-class training.
Future On the Plate
Chawla shares that expansion is definitely on the plate for his brand.
“We want Bakingo to be a brand where people think of nothing else except Bakingo when it comes to celebrations,” he says. That ambition has moved well past the online-only model recently.
In January 2026, Bakingo opened its first physical store at the Indirapuram Habitat Center in Ghaziabad, marking its entry into brick-and-mortar retail alongside its digital-first business. The store’s centerpiece is a self-ordering kiosk, the Dream Station, which lets customers browse and personalize from among more than 5,000 cake designs.
Chawla has indicated that five to six more stores are planned across Delhi-NCR in the months ahead, part of a larger push toward omnichannel growth that also includes expanded manufacturing capacity across Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, and a stated goal of building Bakingo into an INR 1,000 crore national brand within five years.
