Meet the SHEROES - Suchi Mukherjee

E-commerce has taken over the way we shop and live our lives already. Its said to be one of the most practical and convenient ways forward! 

Today we share the interesting concept and story behind LimeRoad an e-commerce venture that offers off beat products through social interactions! Read on to get the drift here, 

How did the idea of LimeRoad come about? How is LimeRoad as an e-commerce retail store different?

Gorgeous products in an extremely easy-to-discover interface was my personal dream. I used to spend whatever limited ‘me time’ I had reading glossy magazines and looking at the larger than life products on display, wanting to be able to touch and buy them.

LimeRoad.com was the inception of an idea that came to me while reading a magazine after the birth of my second child in London. As I flipped through the pages, I found a piece of jewellery I really liked, and just wanted  to  touch it and buy it.

I realized two things at that point.  There was

1. no consumer technology play that made discovery of lovely products easy and entertaining, just like reading a lovely magazine, just like flipping lovely photos in an album.
2. There was also no place from which one could access the vast array of great products that was being manufactured and shipped  out of South-East Asia, the world’s manufacturing hub.

It is this that led to the birth of LimeRoad.com, with the aim to create the most extensive lifestyle platform. Women in India are not looking for just discounts, they want beautiful products and they love to engage with each other. Social interactions is the best way to discover great stuff and hence this is tightly woven into the LimeRoad experience.

What are the short to long term plans you have for the business?

Our visión is to build the most extensive social discovery platform in South East Asia. We aim to not only enable rampant direct selling by users via their unique scrapbooks, but eventually to create a massive ecosystem of applications to be built on the platform, particularly on mobile. In 2016, it is predicted that 40-50mn women will have smart phones. We want to target each of these women, and get them addicted to the LimeRoad experience.

How do you see the future of online retail in India?

Great consumer brands are built from building a tremendously passionate loyal base of customers, who love something fundamental about the product that is beyond simply “discounted prices”.  Indian e-commerce today is mostly about “discounted pricing”, with the core consumer behaviour being ‘where can we get this the cheapest’.  We are on a mission to build the most extensive discovery platform, where consumers come because they get to discover simply great products at affordable prices.  And this discovery is best led  through social channels.  Social commerce plays on the two fundamental shrines of human behaviour – (i) if many others like it, you will more likely than not likely want to see it (ii) if your friends like it, you are more likely than not likely to want to see it.

At Limeroad.com, online shopping is not just about deal hunting. It is about having a great experience while shopping for offbeat products. For instance, our users create scrapbooks in which they put together looks by mixing and matching various product combinations and share with others who can browse through them and discover interesting looks. Also unlike web 1.0 ecommerce sites, <15% traffic comes from Google’s SEM, affiliates and display networks.  There is a combination of direct and social platform traffic.

What are the top three challenges you face in this line on work?

At the very start, finding great people for the team: the combination of skill and real can-do was hard. Complexities with basic infrastructure, including things as basic as reliable internet, complex bank process, involved RoC processes was also a struggle.

How do you best manage to balance your work / personal life?

Entrepreneurship is hard; for men and women alike.  You need the fighter gene to succeed, and that requirement I think is really gender agnostic. It’s possibly harder for women because all said and done, there are simply more family expectations of women.  There are degrees of variations depending on families, backgrounds, histories.  I am grateful to have an extremely supportive family, which helps enormously to ignore the many things I am sure I obviously miss on trying to be the entrepreneur, mom, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, niece etc. all at the same time.  

Having said that, being a parent actually gives you an enormous corpus of learnings on dealing with people, for people even at the most senior levels have adult modes and child-like modes.  Spotting those modes, learning to deal with them, I think makes one a much much stronger leader. 

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