House of Experts Ep 36: Vibha Kagzi in conversation with Rahul Anand, Founder of Hopscotch

House of Experts is a show that ReachIvy kick-started to help those who are unclear about their career choices. We hope through these sessions with some very successful people, we can shed light on a new career path every week. House of Experts plans to make a collection of interactive and informative sessions with experts from various domains.
Vibha Kagzi, the host, is the Founder and CEO of ReachIvy.com, a premium study abroad and career consultancy organization. Vibha, a Harvard alumna, is a successful entrepreneur and believes in helping others chalk out their future careers.

In episode 35 of House of Experts, we were fortunate to host, Rahul Anand is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Michigan. Having worked at diapers.com, one of the largest e-commerce sites in the US. Rahul founded Hopscotch, a kids fashion, and lifestyle brand.

Hopscotch has garnered the love and loyalty of 3 million + moms who transact on their website repeatedly thus making it the biggest kids fashion brand in the country.

Some excerpts from the interview:

1) Tell us about your childhood and early years.
I grew up in Mumbai. In childhood, I excelled at playing the piano and also played squash. As I was growing up, I loved taking apart consumer electronics, and my Dad was proud to see my engineering mind. I used to go to the factory with him, and decided that I wanted to build an empire. For that I needed an engineering degree, and so I went to the University of Michigan. I spent my summers and free time in my family’s factory, and I got a flavour of entrepreneurship, which was a really interesting experience for me. I think the entrepreneurial bug had hit me and I thought I had realized what I wanted to do in life.

2) How do you build a brand?
I think it starts with an understanding of what your consumers want, and find merchandise centered around them. You have to make a lot of decisions based on the people you’re serving. It starts off with those who are close to you, and that is how you gain the experience of serving people. The challenge is understanding how to scale up. It’s all about thinking about the customer day in and day out. As the organization grows, as your customer base and your team grow, you should make sure you stay true to who you are. The beautiful thing about being a brand on the consumer internet is that it’s a huge market. The consumer demand is huge, and if you can get your value proposition right, you’ll find that the Indian market is second to no other.

3) What does growth mean to you?
There are two dimensions. One is to continue to build awareness and get more consumers on your platform, and the other is to get a share of their wallet on your platform. We continue to invest in the Hopscotch platform, and add almost 2000 new consumers every day. Parallelly, we’ve realized that we want to be able on multiple platforms, and so we partner with other platforms of distribution. Every six to nine months, we keep adding more points of distribution and drive growth. There are a lot of international growth opportunities that we might delve into, in the future.

4) What advice would you give to someone who wants to build an e-commerce business?
I would ask people to obsess over the customer. Spend all your time and energy understanding the customers. In a country like India, demand is huge, but we need options that the Indian consumers can afford and aspire for. Secondly, don’t spend money building technology because there are a lot of affordable options available that you can buy off the shelf. This will help you get there faster and you won’t be distracted trying to build a team and organizing things. Also, get your product-market fit right. There’s a great book called ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries and it’s really helpful for those starting out. While there are tons of consumers out there, a large number of consumers have given a sizable chunk of capital to technology which often tends to be disruptive. Having control over the consumers is strategically important, but it’s also important to forge relations, which helps you learn faster and adapt to what the consumer needs. The key is to keep looking until you find what your true calling is.

We are really thankful to Rahul for candidly sharing his journey and for all his novel insights about building an e-commerce brand.

Missed out on the previous house of expert episodes? You can watch them here

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