Suchi Mukherjee
You need the fighter gene to succeed
A graduate in economics from St Stephen's College, Delhi, and with a masters in finance and economics from London School of Economics, UK, Mukherjee comes from a strong background in building, transforming and re-inventing businesses. If her longspanning career of more than 16 years working in the UK with companies such as Skype, eBay and Gumtree in different capacities equipped her with first-hand knowledge of the functioning of the business, the idea for Limeroad came to her during one of those rare "me time" moments while she was on her maternity break, after her second child, in London. "It was the inception of an idea that came to me while reading a glossy magazine where I found a piece of jewellery I really liked, and felt the urge to reach out, touch it and buy it," she says. To her dismay she found out that the piece of jewellery was from a local artisan from Mumbai and she could not have it any time soon. It was this realisation that led to the birth of Limeroad, and a new journey and challenge for her.
"I understood that there was no consumer technology play that made discovery of lovely products easy and entertaining, just like reading a magazine, or like flipping photos in an album. Also, that there was no place from which one could access the vast array of products that were being manufactured and shipped out of South-East Asia, the world's manufacturing hub," she adds. That's how Limeroad came into existence, with a novel concept as the backbone of its foundation. "I wanted to create a digital-age equivalent of the 16th century Grand Trunk Road, a highway that changed the face of trade in the Indian subcontinent. Limeroad is inspired by the legendary GT Road. By curating the best of Indian products across categories, we are building a revolution in e-commerce," she says.
Mukherjee decided to come back to India in 2011, with a vision of creating a global brand, and got together with her co-founders-Prashant Malik, who was the tech lead at Facebook, and Ankush Mehra, ex-head of supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets, to launch Limeroad a year later in 2012. A social discovery platform where consumers come because they discover beautiful products, read clothes, accessories such as shoes, bags and jewellery, at affordable prices, Limeroad has about 50,000 sellers on its online shop since June last year. "Our scrapbooking community has increased from 30,000 to 75,000 in last one year. The community posts three million style statements as scrapbooks every month. That's a 100x growth in less than a year," says Mukherjee.
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