A maverick is someone of tremendous imagination and prescient, a person who challenges norms and forces humans to suppose past the everyday. YourStory goes behind the curtain to find the inspirations and secrets of the remaining maverick within the business world: the entrepreneur.
This week, we’re taking a look at a maverick of the ecommerce world: Rajiv Srivatsa, Co-founder of Urban Ladder.
Rajiv Srivatsa, an IIT-Chennai and IIM-Bangalore graduate, took a considerable hazard with his Co-Founder and CEO Ashish Goel when the 2 decided to start Urban Ladder. In 2012, no person in India turned into shopping for furnishings online. Still, Rajiv reasoned that four years earlier, human beings could have balked at shopping for cellular telephones and clothes online too.
Cut to 2019, and commercial enterprise is booming. The Indian furniture and fixtures marketplace is growing steadily and is ready to touch $ forty-four billion in FY22, keeping with a RedSeer record. Unlike different players inside the area, Urban Ladder best focuses on personal labels and presents premium offerings.
Through the highs and lows, the founders realized the cost of creating errors, the significance of landing on both feet, and making use of each 2d.
Before Urban Ladder was even an opportunity, Rajiv spent over a decade working with several multinational agencies, including Infosys, Cognizant, and Yahoo. When he became in Switzerland, running for Cognizant, Rajiv realized that he belonged inside the internet area and gave up enrolling in Yahoo in Bengaluru.
At the same time, Ashish had just wrapped up his stint at Amar Chitra Katha and became Bengaluru. The two buddies observed there were no relied on fixtures brands that provided products of constant nice.
The duo decided to take a danger and release Urban Ladder, reasoning that they had sufficient money to go two years without a salary if it got here all the way down to that. At the time, Flipkart changed into the dominant participant inside the market, and Amazon hadn’t even entered India.
“Starting a business changed into probably the biggest guess that we took –as each Ashish and I didn’t have a history in e-commerce or furniture.”
They released Urban Ladder with simply 35 designs of their catalog, occurring an intestine feeling that e-commerce turned into a good wager. Since 2012, the organization has raised about $112—eight million from investors, including Ratan Tata, SAIF Partners, Kalaari Capital, and Sequoia Capital.
In 2017, it published a 70 percent boom in consolidated sales to Rs 95 crore for FY17 and narrowed its internet loss to Rs 155 crore from Rs 182 crore inside the equal length.
Urban Ladder views itself as a logo rather than just a platform for others, says Rajiv. It’s approximately controlling and tweaking their own designs, he provides. Besides their mainstay furniture, the corporation also provides indoor design offerings and is increasing into physical retail as properly.
