ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Rahul Dash: PGP-2009 (Co-founder and COO of Purplle)
Rahul Dash is the Co-founder and COO of Purplle, one of India’s leading online beauty and personal care platforms that sells beauty and personal care products online to consumers in Tier-II and III cities in India. It is the only e-commerce platform that has built a unique proposition to provide accessible and inclusive beauty to women across the country. Purplle has reached an annualised gross merchandise value of INR 2300 Cr in FY 24 and valuation of over $ 1 billion.
Rahul’s impact extends beyond just building a successful venture. Purplle is committed to provide employment to women (50% of the employees are women) and the specially abled. Purplle is also collaborating with non-profits working for women’s rights and to support education of the underprivileged.
Rahul has been mentoring other founders and has been an angel investor for other startups. For students, he has been a role model participating in the IIMA Entrepreneurship Summit, sharing his experiences and fueling students’ ambition for entrepreneurship.
Congratulations on winning the young alumni achievers award. What does this award mean to you?
Thank you. Gettin it from your alma mater is a big deal. It may have cultivated the various facets of who I am as an individual. I also want to experience a lot of entrepreneurial zeal. When I was there at IIMA I met ex- entrepreneurs who graduated from IIMA maybe 20-25 years back coming to campus and sharing their learnings with us. That was super exciting. It made me resilient and allowed me to believe in myself and on what I could do.
You were working in the Tata group before graduating from IIMA, what motivated you to be an entrepreneur and what motivated you to start Purplle?
I joined Tata administrative services (TAS) right out of PGP. Tata Group has a lot of different kinds of companies, and you can do projects in different companies, and that’s the typical rotation that a TAS officer goes through.I was fortunately put in situations by the group, given opportunities in very early stage efforts of some projects. What you see today as Tata Sampan, which is one of the consumer brands which has grown big, started off with a small team in 2008-09. We were trying to source for us to package and sell Urad Dal. I was put up in a small village in Tamil Nadu and my job was to figure out if there is a way I can aggregate urad dal from farmers, process them and get it to Chennai. That was like my first experience. From there I moved into this company called TASL which is Tata Advanced Systems limited. We were basically trying to manufacture the fuselage of a civilian helicopter with Sikorsky which is a US based Defense Organization, aerospace manufacturing company. So my second job was to go and set up a factory which was doing everything for this aero-structure. So basically, these kinds of things are what the Tata group exposed me to. I think that that pushed me to say, “Okay, this is super exciting. I would like to kind of build something.” And then I started doing strategy work with Tata Power. And realized, though, my calling kind of lies somewhere else. Things that are smaller, something that is more zero to one [build companies to create something new]. That I would say helped me in my journey to becoming an entrepreneur.
Purplle is in a very highly competitive space of beauty and personal care. What do you think has differentiated Purpple from others?
I know that there are two incremental aspects to the market in addition to being competitive, one is a very large market and a very high growth market. So there’s a lot of value that is getting added to the market every year, in terms of new consumers coming in, new formats coming in, and , we basically identified a direction in which aspiration was moving in our segment. We zeroed in on a specific target. So we basically go after a lot more Bharat as compared to a lot of Metro luxury based audiences. That’s one of the things that we did and a directional call that we took in at that point. All of us come from very small towns. We also invested in ensuring that we get very high quality brands of our own, which is the second part that differentiated so if you look at our business today, about half of our business comes from brands that we own. The last and the most important part is data and technology progress. At the core of it, we are technologists, engineers. We just happen to be in the beauty segment. That focus started in 2014-15, we thought things can be solved using technology.
What challenges did you face when you were scaling and how did you address and overcome them?
We have been there for 12 years. So let me divide this into the first 4-5 years, the next 4-5 years, and the third. The first 4-5 years was convincing people that this is even possible, convincing brands that they should be selling on a vertical platform, convincing investors that vertical platforms will exist and become large. At that point in time, Amazon had just entered the market. We started our business before Amazon started this business in India, Flipkart was there earlier. So Flipkart was an inspiration. The second 4-5 years were a lot of building blocks. So the first set of technology, the data stack was getting put together. We launched our first brand during that time. So there was a lot of pivotal learning that happened during the next, I would say, these 4-5 years shaped the business in a certain direction. So everything was a lot more zero to one, I would say one to 10 during the next 4-5 years. 2020 onwards, there’s been a lot more team and institution building and the key focus area was trying to kind of get people to work with you, having them aligned to a vision which is a little more contrarian. We’re not really exactly sure how a standard beauty company operates. I think we have been able to build a solid and when we look back we have never looked at this data. Now we look back and say, “Okay, how many people do we have from elite institutions?” I would say about 40-45% now, which is, didn’t happen by design, it just happened over a period of time, trying to build bit by bit, each of them, convincing each of them. Because from our perspective, we typically look for slightly longer term alignment culturally, because your alignment is more important than your skill set that you bring to the table.
After winning the Young Alumni Achiever’s Award, what are your plans for, professionally and personally?
I just became a father to twins about 20 days back. So that’s a big change in my personal life. That’s one of the reasons why I couldn’t come to the campus. So there’s a change in life that has happened and we are now looking at our journey within blocks of 10 years. We used to look at it as as blocks of two to three years earlier, with wherever we have reached, as an institution right now, and as founders, we we’re all 39-40 years old, so our belief is that we have about 40 more years to go when we hang up our so that’s about four blocks of 10 years. That’s four massive compounding that you can do. Maybe we will create an institution as large as the group that I came from, the Tata Group, which then, you know, also has that kind of foundation, can be carried forward. And I’m hoping that I can do that while also being able to spend time with family and all of that. So it will be interesting to see how that balance plays out. It’s not easy theoretically, you can say a lot of things, but it’s not an easy balance. So let’s see two very large goals to bring up two very young human beings and a big institution, which is a responsibility for about four decades.
