Digital business leader who has built, run and turned around eCommerce & omni-channel operations for fashion and lifestyle brands across India and Asia-Pacific — from first-mover startups to a 70+ country global footwear group.
Sharad is a result-oriented digital business leader with a track record of building, running and scaling eCommerce and omni-channel businesses for fashion and lifestyle brands. He currently heads eCommerce for Bata Group across India and Asia-Pacific — a major global footwear brand present in 70+ countries — after leading its India business to consistent YoY online growth and omni-channel rollout.
Earlier in his career he took a premium fast-fashion brand onto the path to profitability, launched a luxury eCommerce portal across five Asia-Pacific markets in partnership with American Express, and built India's first RBI-licensed eGifting platform as its CEO. At BIBA, India's leading women's ethnic wear brand, he built the analytics function and positioned the brand's D2C site as one of the country's best-run.
His work spans the full stack of a digital retail business — strategy, P&L ownership, product and platform, performance marketing, category management and organisation building — grounded in an earlier engineering career in telecom software. He holds an MBA from IIM Lucknow and an MS in Computer Networking from North Carolina State University, and was recognised as a Most Influential eCommerce Professional.
Roadmaps for brands moving from single-channel to true omni-channel — the sequencing, org design and metrics that make it stick, drawn from doing it at scale across three brands.
Unit-economics and margin work for eCommerce businesses under pressure — the same cost, category and channel-mix levers used to take American Swan onto the path to profitability.
Standing up a new digital retail business end to end — platform, category strategy, marketing and organisation — for founders and brands entering eCommerce for the first time.