HOW I got into advertising is an interesting story. At IIM Ahmedabad, I had applied for marketing jobs and within the first hour of placements, I landed up with a couple of them. My advertising professor, the great Subroto Sengupta, then called and told me — “Arvind, you have a really curious and restless mind and whether you are managing a baby food or a soft drink brand, you will get bored sooner than you expect. When that happens, please call me and join advertising”. He was right; that’s exactly what happened and I did join him a few years later. Fortunately, advertising successfully answered my perennial question of ‘what next’ for close to three decades. But about four years ago, after I had been a part of Leo Burnett’s Global Leadership Council for a while, the ‘what next’ question popped up again. The answer to the question this time lay in donning a new hat —that of an e-commerce entrepreneur.
I have heard people lamenting that there is no space for new players in e-commerce anymore and therefore they have missed the opportunity to be the Bansals. Just like in 1995, when some people said that all the super-busy people who need cellphones had already bought them and therefore there was no market left for cellphones in India! E-commerce is in a similar phase in 2015. Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra and Snapdeal are well known e-commerce brands but how business landscapes pan out is determined by the ultimate lords of today’s world—the consumers. And people have always bought jewellery from a jeweler, clothes from a cloth merchant or a tailor and so on. The truth is human nature is not about to change fundamentally. So a large number of specialty e-commerce brands are round the corner.
It is only when seismic shifts take place that can one spot amazingly large spaces that are still relatively uncontested. I have picked a space that I believe is large and exciting and have launched indiasarihouse.com just a couple of months ago. My partner Amit Gaur, one of the founders of Yepme.com, brings seven years of valuable e-commerce experience to our venture. Thanks to him, the really challenging job of organising a supply chain from nearly 30 weaving centres of the country has been achieved relatively smoothly.
Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra sell saris. So do ethnic e-commerce sites. And they will be successful in their own way and play important roles in the sari e-commerce market. But we believe that Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) branding has been an immeasurable source of competitive advantage for KFC. It has created top of mind for the fast food player in the single largest quick service food category that people consume.
Similarly, indiasarihouse.com seems to be benefitting from its focused branding and business. Response to our website has been exceeding our forecasts on all counts, starting with Facebook fans, to website engagement metrics, to registered users on the website, to saris sold per day, to average cheque size and average price of saris sold. Consumers are appreciative of our unique identity that is designed to help them focus on their saris, touch them with their eyes, select them and buy them. With just symbolic advertising spends, all metrics are growing nicely. These numbers are small—numbers that brick and mortar players will turn up their noses at, but it will be a different story in 12 months. We now have customers in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, South Africa, Oman, Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain, Sri Lanka, Malaysia….
We are acutely conscious that the internet has a way of reducing every category to one or two players. There is only one Facebook, with LinkedIn being a narrower specialist. And there is practically only one search engine now—Google. So we have to execute really well and scale up fast. So, for the moment, my perennial question ‘what next’ throws up enough challenges to keep us very,
very busy.
Looking into the future, there are infinite opportunities in e-commerce. FashionandYou, Zovi and Lenskart are now well known e-commerce brands. Pepperfry.com and many others are on their way. Eventually, there will be a couple of large e-commerce players each in jewellery, shoes, specialty foods and wines, pharma and many other categories. At this point, one has to ask what the exact definition of e-commerce is. If one includes services and not just goods in the definition —the power of the internet to bring together large numbers of goods and services providers and large numbers of users and organise them into an efficient market will be put to use in hundreds of different spaces. If one brainstorms, probably every fifth idea one comes up with will be a good idea —provided one has the skills and strengths to execute it better than another player who also has the same idea. It is happening all the time in this space. I began my adolescent life as a science talent scholar with dreams of technology transforming the world. My curiosity about everything in the world took me to the world of business, marketing, retailing, branding, consumer behaviour, design and creativity.
E-commerce with technology as a key pillar in meeting people’s needs and wants completes the circle. My wife says that this is not quite the age for me to be like a kid in a toy store but in this space, I do feel like one. The toys and the games involve a heady mix of interests acquired over a lifetime— passion for business, brands, consumer behaviour, retailing, design and all things related to technology.
The author is co-founder of Indiasarihouse.com and former chairman and CEO -India subcontinent of ad agency Leo Burnett
