Peyush Bansal Curated
CEO and Founder at Lenskart
CURATED BY :
What is your strategy towards growing your private labels like John Jacobs and Vincent Chase?
Do you think there is sufficient talent in the market, with specific skill requirement changing with time?
What made you focus on the Lenskart vertical after launching portals like Bagskart, Watchkart?
What are the differences in consumer's buying behaviour in online vis-a-vis offline store?
Any advice for other entrepreneurs?
The start of the journey needs to be right. The problem needs to be sizeable enough to solve. Funding is overrated in India. The qualification of a good business is not whether it has raised money, but whether the opportunity is large.
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Was launching the offline stores a turning point?
It significantly increased accessibility to the brand. Our stores are unique because we don’t sell in the store, but only take orders. We are solving the problem of trial.
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What were the biggest challenges you faced?
The biggest challenge was to find the right people when we didn’t have money. We had to sell them the passion. Among investors, the initial reaction was that it was going to be no more than a Rs 40 crore business over the following five years, so not large enough. I think now we have made the investors realise it’s already a Rs 600 crore business, and can be a Rs 6,000 crore business. Doubts don’t exist any longer. The mindset changed when people realised we were not giving up and were exceeding our own targets.
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Was your main focus earlier on selling eyewear online?
Yeah, I wanted to figure out why no one could sell it online. As we got deep into the problem, we realised there is a lot involved in spectacles – manufacturing of lenses, cutting those lenses, getting eye power of customers. Customers weren’t buying online for a number of reasons – it was too expensive, they needed to have their vision checked. We started launching solutions to address these problems. We launched virtual try-on, then we launched our offline store two years ago. We worked backwards, from the problem to the solution.
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How did you think of starting Lenskart?
I studied in Delhi, and did engineering in Canada at McGill University. While doing engineering, an internship at Microsoft in Seattle got me excited about computer and software. After my graduation, I went to work at Microsoft in 2007. I was happy, but the work I was doing was incremental, not as revolutionary as I wanted it to be. I quit Microsoft and moved to India in 2008 to start out on my own. I started building a classifieds website for students first. It was like Quikr for college kids. It was scaling well, but we were simultaneously looking at other problems to solve. We liked to work on niche problems. Eyewear was something being written about a lot, but it was a category no one was working on. We used to hire interns during summers, and one summer we gave them the eyewear project. In 2010-11, we were working on both initiatives. At one point, IDG (venture capital firm) decided to fund us for Lenskart. So we decided to shut down the other piece.
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