Leaders & Innovators

Himanshu joined Snapdeal in Nov 2021 and is currently the CEO of Snapdeal and Stellaro Brands. Building Snapdeal 2.0: A pioneer of Indian e-commerce, Snapdeal exclusively serves India’s value commerce segment, with quality products designed to meet the requirements of mid-income, price-conscious buyers. Snapdeal’s focus is on providing excellent levels of quality, convenience and predictability associated with branded retail to purchase decisions beyond the world of well-known brands. It consciously works with a curated base of reliable and quality sellers, who have a high bar on product quality, to deliver delightful experiences to its customers.

With the help of the young stellar Snapdeal team, Himanshu is re-building Snapdeal into a high growth profitable value lifestyle e-commerce leader.

He is a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, post which he completed his Post Graduation in Marketing & Finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Himanshu is an experienced industry leader with experience in FMCG, retail and fashion. He also has significant exposure to technology solutions and e-commerce during his stints in retail and fashion. Himanshu’s previous assignments pan over Arvind Fashions, The Mobile Store (Essar), Trent Limited (Tata Group) and Lakme Lever (Hindustan Unilever), to name a few.

Danial has more than 30 years of experience in the Lifestyle industry with a focus on apparel and Accessories. With strong analytical skills and expertise in the whole value chain (BD, design, production, distribution, communication…), He is able to take a 360° approach to the lifestyle business. He is also extensively experienced in creating, motivating, and managing teams of highly talented professionals.

He founded DNA Group in 2008. DNA is a group of multicultural boutique companies dedicated to building and developing lifestyle & fashion brands across Asia, America, and Europe. DNA provides holistic solutions for improving production chains, product range expansion, brand portfolio, right distribution channels, or marketing the brand in an engaging way. Their services are tailored to the different needs and growth requirements of each business. They help Western brands to get access to Asian markets and Asian companies to get into the West.

Before founding DNA Group Daniel held leadership roles with various brands across South America and Europe.

Ms. Nina Lekhi, the Founder MD and Chief Design Curator of Baggit, is an accidental entrepreneur, who pursued her creative hobby of designing bags for the No. 1 Ladies' Handbags brand in India. It all started with Rs 7,000 borrowed from her mother after she failed in her first year of college. Baggit is perhaps the only leading Brand to persist with the difficult task of making completely in India, rather than importing from China as most competing brands do. This commitment and execution of strategy has been demonstrated to a number of consumer product companies that India can compete and beat Chinese products in India and internationally too, after building a dominant presence in India.

Nina recognizes the fact that employment opportunities for unskilled labourers with very little education are the primary need for the development of weaker sections of the Indian population. Her determination to make it in India at all costs is arising out of this primary concern. She is willing to sacrifice easy profits for herself by importing from China like other competitors, but unwilling to waver from making in India for the last 35 years, whereas “Make in India” has become fashionable only in the last 5 years. Nina has always supported responsible fashion consumption and to that extent, Baggit offers classical fashion designs that are high quality, highly durable and ever-lasting rather than trendy fashion styles that come and go every season. In addition, the company is launching “Maatii”, its 3rd brand targeting evolved consumers looking for bio-degradable and sustainable fashion products. Protecting mother earth is the key promise of “Maatii”.

The company has also launched “Enoki”, a highly durable mass brand addressing the biggest “ value for money” market segment. This brand will demolish the myth that quality branded products have to be necessarily expensive and reduce the burden of discarded products of poor quality, unsustainable and cheap products currently being bought by the mass segment.

Nina Lekhi has faced many ups and downs in the business over the last 35 years and resilience is one. of her significant personality trait. Her biography, titled “Bag it All, " inspires women to follow their dreams and be resilient. The key message of the biography is that “if I can do it, so can you”. She is a role model for countless women entrepreneurs and other ordinary women who anyways are doing extraordinary things in life by balancing their work and home lives. In fact, the Baggit brand celebrates such ordinary women and encourages them to follow their hearts and dreams and be resilient.

Nina is transforming Baggit from a promoter-driven company to a professionally managed company with aspirations to be a responsible global fashion company. From controlling every aspect of the business to delegating authority and learning to manage through an inspirational style of management has not been an easy process for her. However, her commitment to follow through on the difficult transformational journey is inspirational for other promoter-driven companies that are struggling to scale up, because of the changes required in leadership style.

Nina can be called the most experienced and valuable Designer of Ladies' handbags in India with significant winners over the last 40 years. She loves visiting the stores selling Baggit merchandise every weekend and interacting with customers. Baggit brand incorporates all the customer wants and needs to be gleaned through personal interactions with thousands of customers over the years. Customers vouch for the Quality, Durability and satisfaction of possessing and using Baggit handbags over the years. However, the Brand captures the specialness of the “Atrangi” personality trait of Nina Lekhi.

Ramesh has rich cross Industry, and cross-geography experience of over 25 years across high complexity, intensely competitive industries such as FMCG, Retail and telecom and now Media. He has been in leadership roles across companies such as Hypercity Retail, Future Group, Airtel and Spencers leading change and transformation in mostly turn around and start-up situations. Prior to re-joining HT media recently as the CEO for the Radio and digital audio businesses he was group CEO at food and beverage startup Wingreens farms. He has also been the CEO, Small Format Retail with Future Group and held held senior management roles at Pepsico, Colgate Palmolive and ITC.

With a proven ability to drive businesses through conceptualizing and evolving strategy, people and cultural transformation, digital innovation and augmenting & streamlining traditional and new age Go to Market Strategies.

Arun is a first-generation IT entrepreneur with almost 50 years of association with the industry. After completing his engineering in Computer Science from IIT, Bombay was selected to the elite SMT program of DCM Group in 1974 and then he went on work with them to build India’s first IT company DCM Data Products till 1983.

After leaving DCM Data Products as the Regional Head of Western India He joined International Computers India Manufacturers(ICIM), an Indian subsidiary of International Computers Limited, UK as Vice President, Marketing. Arun founded and served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of ICIM International Inc. (Zensar Technologies) building it from scratch in 1991. He developed lower-cost offshore resources, leveraging economic and global development cycles to ICIM’s benefit, thereby consolidating the parent company’s leadership role in outsourcing services.

After leaving Zensar in 1999, he started his own venture, iCelerate Inc. in 2000 as President & CEO. After iCelerate’s acquisition in 2007, he helped a few other ventures in the valley to scale and grow. In 2009 he launched Runa Inc. which was acquired by Staples in 2014.

After supporting few other startups in the valley till 2017, he has been working with few not for profit organizations in advisory capacity. Apart from achieving success in his own career Arun has been instrumental in helping hundreds of young professionals in shaping their careers through his mentorship and leadership.  

With over thirty years as a corporate executive in the retail industry, Evelyn has broad-based international experience in luxury, mass and speciality retail; product and business development across the spectrum of the fashion, food and retail services.  

She is the founding partner and President of Retail Resource Partners Inc., an independent boutique advisory firm working with both niche and global brands considering entry into the North American Market.  They evaluate opportunities, thorough comprehensive research, market analysis and if required, the development of sales and marketing strategy.  The group's extensive network allows them to build strategic partnerships supporting company growth.  

Her passion is idea generation and innovation; identifying opportunities that connect like-minded individuals and businesses; creating opportunities and destinations that drive traffic and memorable customer experiences. 

She has worked with such notable companies as Marks & Spencer, in the UK and Canada, Holt Renfrew (Selfridges Group) and The Hudson’s Bay Company where she was a Senior Merchant as well as leading the business development team, introducing some exciting new business ventures.  This included multiple innovative pop-ups and concessions, including the launch of Kleinfeld Bridal in Canada and the development and execution of both the Food Halls and restaurant strategy for Hudson’s Bay and Saks Canada.   

Ranjan Sharma has been working with Bestseller India since August 2012 as CIO and Head of Supply Chain and has over 26 years of experience. He started his career in June 1996 with Futurecom as Product Manager and was responsible for handling IT infrastructure sales to Corporate Houses of brands like IBM, Compaq and HCL. He was also responsible for developing a team for sales and support.

In July 2001 he moved to Vishal Retail Ltd. as Store Manager and became Zonal Operation head and subsequently Head of IT. Here he was responsible for setting up long-term IT and Supply chain strategy. In his last stint before joining Bestseller, he was working with Future Group. He has worked at various profiles like Head of SAP Practise, Head of Packaged applications and Head of IT and was responsible for - Building SAP Retail team.   He also worked on a whole bunch of strategic and tactical initiatives. He worked extensively on warehouse automation to achieve higher efficiency.

Ranjan is an alumnus of the American International University of Management & Technology and IIM Kozhikode.

Vikram started his retail tech journey with a project on Air India in 1990 and since then he has had a hands-on approach towards all transformation projects undertaken by him. He is a Business-oriented CIO with a demonstrated ability to improve the performance of businesses through systematic technology investment and measurement of returns. At Landmark, he will focus on driving technical innovation, customer experience enhancement, delivering high-quality products, and implementing large-scale technology initiatives. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikramidnani/