At BrilliantRead Media, we always strive to bring to our community some of the finest stories from the startup and leadership world. As part of this endeavour, we invited Shahab Rizwan for an exclusive interview with us. He is a Leader, E-Commerce Expert, Business Consultant and the COO at Spyne. Let’s learn more about his inspiring journey, his background and his advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Shahab:
We are aware of your contribution to the ecosystem, talk us through your background and your journey, please;
My interest as a kid was Electronics and while in college we 3 friends just for a hobby would set up exhibitions for women’s lifestyle fashion. The kind of response we received encouraged me to get a lot more deeper into it.
Thus my retail journey started that not only excited me but also exposed me to various segments of it – including merchandising, space/store planning and management, pricing architecture, resource optimisation, logistics and import management – during my stint with Shoppers Stop, ITC, Mothercare, Ecko Unltd.”
Then as e-commerce was setting sight in India, I was lucky to be part of then the biggest and most popular portal FashionAndYou.com which started as an invitation-only privately held flash sales club offering genuinely amazing discounts for lifestyle branded fashion.
My first assignment was to do category management for apparel, non-apparel, home decor and furniture besides identifying gap areas and source merchandise to fix it.
Was instrumental in playing around with physiological pricing to attain not only best gross margins along with improved top-line sales for segments that earlier showed lesser promise alongside building impressive high yielding sales campaigns.’
How did you find your passion and purpose and started working with it?
But I soon realized that the majority of the Indian online shoppers were not buying stuff because of sheer discounts, instead they needed to know more about the product through visual presentation, and the returns percentage was a testimony to that.
That’s when I realized that I needed to put my retail in-shop experience on handling customer FAQ’s needed to be employed while creating visual content which answered all probable FAQ’s that had a high impact on offtakes and minimized returns.
So my journey into creating saleable visual content started and be it me sitting on any site of the table – agency or the brand, am always looking at products from a customers point of view. And it’s become a passion over time as the success percentage keeps growing.”
What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e, what’s your source of motivation?
As a kid and a young adult I believed that I needed to do things differently as I wanted to stand out from the herd and stumbling on this phrase –
“Never follow in footsteps, set your own milestones”
affirmed my belief in my ability to withstand the hardships I may encounter walking the path less travelled.
How do you manage yourself and keep on going despite the challenges? What drives you?
Yet another phrase that I have believed and lived by –
“Believe in yourself and all that you can do, nothing can then stop your dreams from coming true”
Please share with us – what has worked well for you so far?
Raising my hand and patting my back when there was none to see/appreciate or even believe in me or the work I was doing. For one of my jobs, the gentleman who initially didn’t realise the importance of change in the process had only appreciated it after about 2yrs in a board meeting when we were brainstorming on an iconic international brand, launch plan in India.
My father used to say, keep doing the good work – someday or the other people will be compelled to accept your work and shall be appreciative about it.”
In your opinion, what are the keys to success?
When I was formally introduced to retail, the most important lesson was learnt in a split second when “R” of Retail was replaced with “D” – citing retail is about detailing and ever since I have never let go of detailing tasks in my work.
You are always positive & motivated, what keeps you going?
The last of the phrases that have always motivated me and helped me stay positive, even in every hopeless situation – “We the willing, led by the unknowing are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing” – it may come across as arrogance when someone is hearing from you, but when you are in a situation and you are telling yourself, then it only radiated strength, energy, vibrancy, motivation and above all self-confidence.
We would love to know your advice for all those starting out?
Believe in oneself, believe in almighty and believe that – “God has a Plan” – an indeed a beautiful one for you which may unfold soon.
Just keep doing good in every job you have on hand with full-on dedication and determination by detailing it out. Success shall be your companion.
And whenever you think you have done amazing work, don’t expect anyone to pat your back, raise your hand and pat your back & get on with another task on hand.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
