$450M, 6 Brands & 4 Countries: Why Sunil Agrawal Refuses to Stop

24:16And that's the whole investment piece. That's a good opportunity to tell a better story. Yeah. Okay. It didn't really impact us. That's awesome. Because that just terrifies me.

24:27Katy Mimari:Because we're talking about growth and how do you lean into it. And I know that you have actually been starting to acquire companies. Is that part of your growth strategy? Yeah. So the first e-com company that we acquired was about two and a half years ago. There was more to learn econ. And we learned a bunch. The second company we acquired, it just fell in our lap. It was a TV shopping company in the UK that was running for 22 years, but went into bankruptcy. And we acquired a good price. And it's a good brand. It's very profitable for us. It's growing very rapidly. You know, one of the things I love about this is, like, direct-to-consumer, I've got, like, you know, you said that you've tried DTC multiple times.

25:10and it did not work. I like that direct-to-consumer for this is just not e-commerce. Like we're talking about like brick and mortar or television. You've done every form of like direct-to-consumer.

25:20Katy Mimari:And in reverse order because you know what they're working on right now is actually transitioning to Shopify. What? Yes. Wait, what? So we were on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which is enterprise level. So we were there for our last eight, nine years. but we found that to be too rigid and not as agile for our today's e-com needs. It was serviced very well when we were on television and e-com was supporting function. But if e-com has to become primary function, we need more agile platforms. And that's why we looked at many platforms and we decided Shopify Enterprise is the best suitable. I'm going to send this to Harley.

26:01I've known Harley and Toby. I started working with them when they had 3 ,000 merchants on the platform, 3 ,000 or 4 ,000. They're good Canadian boys, like hours away from me growing up. Now there are hundreds of thousands. Yeah, I know. Now it's millions of people on the platform.

26:18Katy Mimari:But imagine he's got live shopping on the site. So they had to take something that was completely custom built for them and now make it work. And with the help of AI, it's insane. Yeah. So AI was really God sent. Yeah. And perfect timing. Why? When we made last transition from another platform to Salesforce, it took us almost two years and about$2 million. This time, it took us five months and about half a million dollar, four brands moved to Shopify. And rather smoothly. Much, much more smoothly. And that's an AI thing. All coding is done by AI, largely. Whoa. Yeah. But Eva, we were just talking about this other day.

27:00Katy Mimari:Like, had Sunil started this transition even last year, it would have been chaos. I love that you brought this up. Yeah. I'm sure you follow this, because I also know one of your sons is in tech, and we'll get to that. But the big narrative, one of the competing narratives in AI is that there's just not a lot of value. Or like, where is the value, right? The investment that everybody's making. And then here you are, it's like, no, no, no, this is like a legitimate - Huge value. Yeah. Huge. Massive. For us, the small transition within five months at such a low cost compared to what it would have been otherwise.

27:38With the complexity of your business. Yes. That's insane. Our site has 30 custom applications. 30. With that complexity getting done for five months, within five months, and four brands in the company. Yeah. That's insane. How many total SKUs across the brands at this point? About, so just shoppers is about 28 ,000 SKUs. Oh my God, 28 ,000. And all four brands together must have been about 90 ,000.

28:09Katy Mimari:Oh my God. What are you, you're a high-skew down. Man, you make me feel bad about myself now. No, no, but you're a high-skew down too, because you've got a crazy amount of products. Yeah, but Sunil just, now mine's going to sound really, if I say mine, you've got to say yours, because at least I'll feel better about myself after that. Yeah, I think, I mean, we're active products, probably 6 ,000 active skews. But that's very unusual for e-commerce. Yeah, it is. It's hard. We just... Yeah. It's not even... You're seeing. But it's... I just... Sunil's story is one of my favorite stories, and he is probably one of...

28:41Katy Mimari:I mean, you've made the biggest impression in my life in e-commerce, hands down, of anybody I've met. Thank you. Well, it's... There's just variables here that you just don't see very often. Yeah. Like, we started out at the public thing. The skew count is insane. The fact that you're vertical with the SKU count, then you're multi-brand, you're multi-market. Like you're, it just, you're doing a lot. Like the, I would say the level of difficulty that you're operating at is unusual in what Katie's referring to. Like just call it like D to C is an umbrella, right? Like my business looks so simple.

29:14They're like, we have 15 or 16 ,000 SKUs, but there's no inventory. Like we make it on demand because we own the factories. So it's not, it's, it's a lot simpler than what you guys do.

29:25Katy Mimari:But wait till you see his operations, and you'll understand why he is so successful. It's incredible. They have robots. Not anymore. You fired the robots? Yeah, you fired the robots. You can't fire robots? You can't fire robots. Because they were not working out. No. And he kept his robots in cages. It was a cool thing. What? I mean, it was pretty cool. Oh, no. You see all those fires lined up. Yeah. So they were not working out. So now there's people in cages? And you're the reason we fired them. What? You're the reason we fired them. I'm the reason? You fired your robots? Last time you visited us, and you asked me, Sunil, what is your ROI of the robot?

30:04And that set me thinking, I don't know.

30:07Katy Mimari:Yeah. Because I had people and robots working side by side, and then I split up the cost of robots' operation and the people, and I saw robots costing me more money than I would have with the people. Yeah. So I fired the robots. I love it. Do you have a strong opinion on sort of like robotics? Because like you were, I guess, okay, so when did you first put robots in the environment? About six years ago. Okay. And when you, so you fired yours. I love that. If you look at like sort of state of technology today, do you think that you at some point will bring, is it coming back? Most definitely. Most definitely.

30:45We'll come back. There's no doubt. Because the world is going towards robotics and AI. So we will go towards it. but the system that we bought in UK and US was not working for us.

30:57Katy Mimari:What's really cool about, and maybe it wasn't us, right? Maybe you learned that having people in is just better operations and more efficient. But probably what you learn from having the robots, when we have better options come out, you're going to be able to make much more educated. Like there's not going to be the shiny, you know, nickel syndrome. Like Samil's going to know, you know, there's going to be some cool robot. Like for sure. Yes, and immediately on Twitter, they're all going to talk about, like, it's a change from incrementality to robots. Whatever the buzzword is. Yeah, whatever the buzzword is of the year.

31:28Katy Mimari:Most definitely. And Sunil's going to be like, yeah, you guys have fun. Because you've seen it. Yeah. So you're calling out and then us sending our people to your office and comparing the costs. Yeah. Open our eyes. I didn't know before. I didn't know. I opened his eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you do for Sunil? You're good. You don't know how good you are. Oh, thank you. So you opened the eyes, we compared the costs, went a deep analysis into all line items. We tried to work it out. We tried to make it efficient. We were hitting against something that we could not move. And we took a call for both the U.S.

32:04and U.K. just to fire them. It was a difficult decision.

32:08Katy Mimari:He puts a lot of thought into decisions. I'll tell you that. Something I've learned about this man is he is very thoughtful. I mean, you truly, you think about the entire picture. And I think it's just, I always tell you, do you remember when I told you you had to meet Sunil? I'm like, he is the most wise person I have ever met. Yeah. Do you feel it? He's the wise e-com grandpa. Oh, he's a sunshine. Pete, you are. So Jason's not the grandpa. I'm not e-com grandpa. No, that's Jason's e-com grandpa. No, but we decided yesterday, Jason is the great grandpa of e-commerce. You're the grandpa. And you said you're the uncle?

32:46I get called unc on Twitter all the time. This is the new term that apparently kids use. I don't actually know what it means.

32:52Katy Mimari:I think it's so great. I mean, the events that we go to together, you really are invested in helping people learn through your experiences, which is such a gift. Thank you. There's very time left here. How, the robot thing. Because you have so many people, you've been in business so long, how are you thinking about AI, robotics, impact on organization? Like, where do you sit in this, like, broader conversation around jobs and what are we doing? Or just have you replaced jobs with AI or are you just incorporating it into your company? So, so far our effort is to bring in AI for efficiency gains.

33:32We're doing it every level and trying to retain the talent, if not for that particular job, for something else. We're trying to put in more in revenue generating roles, people who are in back support roles. For example, people who are into media buying or content creation, get them into owning the categories. We have so many different product SKUs and categories, so we don't have enough category owners. So put them into different category owners for different platforms. We have e-com as a platform, we have marketplace as a platform, we have TV as a platform, we have OTT as a platform. So there are multiple positions that we can put them in.

34:10Yeah.

34:10Katy Mimari:I feel like he's lighting up talking about it. Well, it's such a great topic. Yeah. I mean, it's so controversial, right? I tend to be with you. I think we're just going to see more and more companies take this approach of, like, let's just boil the ocean now. Like, you know, we used to not be able to put enough people on it because the cost of putting a person on something relative to the return wasn't worth it. But if the technology gets better, you can now put people on these things because the cost to the upside is totally worth it, which is the whole boil the ocean. And it's like, if I want to do 10 ,000 things, I couldn't before.

34:44Katy Mimari:It's about efficiency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Optimizing for efficiency with these. Yeah, AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to learn and to leverage. Did you feel the same with the mobile transition? The rise of mobile? And then, like, you're... I'm old enough, too, but, like, the dot-com, when that first started, is it the same feeling that you get now, having been in business so long? So I feel it's bigger than dot-com. Really? Yeah. Well, how do you think it's going to impact consumer behavior? Still, I don't, because a lot of people are utilizing AI for research and for shopping.

35:24I still don't know how the consumers will change. There's still emerging technology. But this is technology which would impact humanity more than pretty much anything that we've done. Yeah, I think you're in a really good position for it. I think that the live shopping thing is going to get crazy with AI. And hear me out. Here's my theory. This is why I think you're -

35:49Katy Mimari:You're a copy, Sunil. Get your notepad out. No, no. This is my theory. This is why I think that your business is going to crush. I think it's like any technology tends to commoditize and lower the cost of things. So you're going to get stuff like if I buy toilet paper or deodorant, I'll have machines just do this for me all the time. Those are probably products I don't care too much about. whereas you operate in sort of like entertainment and like the actual shopping right it's not just transacting and i think that the whole like it's much more human and my one of my strong theories is i think that anything that feels more human is going to get even more valuable and anything that is like the opposite of that is where ai is going to sort of like commoditize and take it away i I agree with you.

36:32And to that point, I learned from one of the ECF members, Google, there's so much of value of people doing things by their hand and it's going to become bigger and bigger. So we launched our own DIY jewelry kits business. And that's doing really well. As we go more towards automation, and I believe this AI will also create more loneliness in the people. Yeah, of course. So this kind of business will become more valued.

37:06Katy Mimari:Not to mention, Sunil invented live shopping online before TikTok. Yeah, I know. Well, that's what I mean, but that is now going to be a thing. Yeah. Like live shopping in America is not as big yet as it might be in Asia. Do you think it's because people want to feel, they want to actually believe that they're talking to the real person? I just think that shopping, I think there's just, DTC is largely dominated by 25-year-old men who don't like to shop. And I think that they forget there's a lot of people in the world where shopping is an experience. It isn't a utility. I'm not just turning the taps on.

37:45It's like, no, no, no. They called for the death of the mall, the shopping mall, was e-commerce. I remember that. I remember in the early 2000s, it's like shopping malls are going to go away because this e-commerce thing is here and it's so much better and it's faster and whatever. And meanwhile, you go to a shopping mall today and it's packed and the kids are in there because it's a social experience. It's just a real thing. Yeah. I agree. So that's where the experiential things will come in handy. I do not know how the television shopping or online shopping, which can be bots generated and bots purchased, will fare.

38:18I do not know how it will pan out. Yeah, that's hard to predict. But I do believe that the product that we sell, which really people like to touch and feel, will be there for a long time. Yeah, I think I love this topic because if you look through history, especially recent history, I think there's like a law in the universe that I think actually might be a physics thing where like for every equal, there's an equal and opposing force. I think it's the same culturally. I think a good example would be, I used to bug my wife about this, that I'm like, the vegan movement was so big and so loud so fast that I'm like, something's following it.

38:58And then some years later, it's like, now all people do is eat meat. You know, like there's an opposing movement. Protein, yeah. Or like the CrossFitters. Like anytime you get like this big, this is a big force, there's another opposing force. And I think that's what we're gonna see with AI. It's like, it's so obvious that it's a polarizing thing. We're already there. And I think that while it makes, like you'll see a rise in people being lonely, I actually think it's going to be, and that's why I'm so bullish on like in-person and small intimate events and anything that is like human to human connection.

39:29That's why, again, I think your business is more valuable. Yeah, I think it gets more valuable as an opposing force to the thing that's pushing it. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. Can you, I want to go back to sort of like the birth of this business today. you started off with like TV live TV the e-commerce thing at what point did you guys realize like we need to get we gotta go beyond TV as a channel and lean hard into other forms of acquisition yeah so we saw in TV the growth was moderating initially years we were growing 20-30 % a year and then we had And we still have some room to grow in terms of our TV distribution, but it was moderating.

40:20Katy Mimari:Is it because they were leaning into streaming TV and the viewership was just... So, call cutting is happening. Yeah. Although, OTT is growing. Even over the air, antenna is growing. Oh, really? But not at the speed of the loss of the cable. Oh, okay. So, then there is a growth challenge. So, we had to go towards e-com. That's where I became a member of MDS and ECF. And I met you guys and learned tons from you. You've been a great teacher. Is there not a world where you can go from like a linear TV to transition into streaming? So streaming as an advertising mechanism for D2C is good. But streaming for live TV is still not mature.

41:09Katy Mimari:Do you think it will become? It's difficult to go further because to get distribution into those networks as a live TV, as a live shopping TV, is not easy. Because they prefer sports content or home content or entertainment content rather than a shopping content. Do you think it's a demographics problem? So they're streaming as a younger audience and your business might be positioned or serving older? Although I think the older demographic has also gone into OTT. but the platform owner's mindset is still there, to your point. And they are still in the younger demographic. They want sports, they want entertainment, younger demographic programming, which we don't.

41:52So slowly it'll come, I know it'll come. And we are into some platforms already. But till the time that the market matures for TV shopping, we have to find other avenues of growth. And that we believe is e-com. That's where I am at ECF and talking to you. Yeah, like the more, what we call it, like traditional e-com. You know, so like you're buying traffic, digital app, like all the ad, auction-based ad platforms. Yeah. So you've got a huge amount of products. The business started in sort of like gemstones, jewelry. Can you give us an idea of like what are the other major categories that you're in just for people watching?

42:34About 65 % of sales is jewelry. Okay. 35 % is non-jewelry. And the idea of non-jewelry was our customers are loyal to us. They trust us. And if you offer them good value and good quality of other products, they'll buy from us.

42:49Katy Mimari:The definition of product expansion. Yeah, I was going to say, Sean's going to watch this and be so happy. Yeah, he is. More product. So he'll justify this. All he ever says is more product. It's a different ballgame than you to see econ. But 30, you said 35 % is all these other product categories. Other products are beauty, home, kitchen, accessories. And all under the Shop LC banner? All under the Shop LC banner. For U.S. and U.K. is D.J.C., Germany, Shop LC as well. What is the weirdest product you sell? I remember one time. I want to know. One of our homebuyers got these dinosaur replicas.

43:26A dinosaur replica? He bought tons of them. It filled the warehouse, and it was difficult to share. It was pretty cheap. I don't know if you got it.

43:35Katy Mimari:What? It was like a buyer gone rogue. He's like, I think this dinosaur will sell. How do you actually, how does buying work with this many SKUs? This is a great point. Because like you've got all these employees, how do you put guardrails in place to not have that happen? Each of them have their own OTB systems in place. And each of them are rewarded based on their performance. How much inventory they have, what is the profit they got per minute. And we break it down, each vertical for P &R. Honestly, everybody watching should go immediately to Facebook ad library just to see his product assortment.

44:10Katy Mimari:I've done that. And I'm very confusing. It's crazy. I'll be honest. Was there ever a product that just went like viral that surprised you? Yeah, there was a one-time bracelet we bought called Shabala. So it was a kind of macrame knitted bracelet with some crystals. And we didn't know it was so crazy. We sold millions of them over a few months. We sold millions of those bracelets. Wow. It just went crazy. It was like cultural phenomena at the time? It was cultural phenomena. It was trending on social. It was started by somebody about Shambhala bracelet. And one of our buyers picked it up, and it just went crazy.

44:49That was about 10 years ago.

44:50Katy Mimari:How do you decide? Because I know that you've shown me before that a lot of your life, shopping, the message is very much there's only 100 left. There's only 50 left. Like real scarcity, real FOMO. Oh, you just wait until you watch it. It is incredible. Am I buying something today? Is that what's going to happen? Yeah. And you're like, oh, shit. I'm totally taking that. Canes. They sell canes. There we go. So how do you decide what stays as inventory on your site? Maybe these bracelets. And then what do you do if you buy something and it doesn't sell? How do you liquidate that? So we bring in smaller quantities when we bring in.

45:24So we bring about 100 new products every day. and then we bring them in small quantities, something like$20 ,000 sales or$15 ,000 sales or something like that.

45:34Katy Mimari:So you have a testing. You really test it. Testing mechanism with 100 new products coming every day. And whichever does well, we bring in higher quantity and if sales again, bring higher quantities. And most is jewelry, so it's very quick to bring around. We manufacture ourselves so we can turn around the things within four weeks. I love it. And there's probably times where you've sold out of it and you're like, God, we should have ordered more, right? That's the ultimate. But the point of the business is the treasure hunting. Yeah. So we have a lot of sellouts every day and there's FOMO for the people.

46:03And that's a good thing. Yeah. That's got to be hard, though, in auction-based ads in DTC because they reward momentum and scale. So if you get into something, like I'm just thinking of Meta, and you start spending against it, you don't want to stop. It's like Amazon. The minute you stop, it's like, damn it, now I've got to restart this thing.

46:23Katy Mimari:Or how do you monitor that? because it's driving traffic probably to a PDP or maybe a collection. But if it's sold out, what do you think about that? So that's a good point. So if you land people to PDP or a landing page of an individual product, it's very hard. But you could land them on a collection page where you refresh that collection every time. For example, the jewelry DIY kits. Our plan is to launch those kits every day, new ones, and retire the old ones every day. Sell out, don't bring them again. So the people would come back for those new ones, new kits every day. So Zara does that very well.

47:02Oh, yeah. So Zara has refresh of inventory every week. Yeah. And we deeply learned from them to create that FOMO, bring the limited quantities, and let people come in again. So on average, TV customers buy from us 15 times a year. Whoa. Oh, my God. Okay. Do you have a customer that has spent a weird amount of money with you? Like you must have them. So like an average of 15 tells me that there's somebody who buys like 100 times a year. And there's somebody who buys once. More than that. More than 100 times a year. There are people who buy every day.

47:36Katy Mimari:Okay. So I remember you telling me, Matt's going to like this. We talked about LTV one time. Tell him what your most valuable customer, where do they start shopping? Do they start shopping online? Do they start shopping on TV, on your website? Who's your most valuable customer? So the most valuable entry point for us is television, but we have multiple platforms. We have television, we have a website catalog, we have a rising auction on the website, we have Web TV as well, we have OTT. So the customer who buys from just TV, our lifetime value for that is about$800. The customer who buys only on the website, the lifetime value is about$100.

48:18Whoa.

48:18Katy Mimari:Yeah. The customer who buys on both, their lifetime values about$1 ,500. And the customer who buys from five platforms, their lifetime values$20 ,000. What? Okay, I quit. Unpack that last one. I want to know how to do this. The customer whom we can successfully transition from one to other, to other, to other, at least five platforms. We have about seven platforms in the company the customer can interact with. What's a platform to you? Like TV. Yep. Then we have on our website catalog, we have website clearance, we have website$1 auction, we have live TV, we have OTT platforms. So total seven platforms, we have marketplaces too.

49:02So total seven platforms. A customer who can buy from five platforms of lifetime value is$20 ,000.

49:09Katy Mimari:Do you know what percentage of your total customers falls into that category? Very few, but our top 2 % customers gives us 50 % of revenue. Whoa. Oh, my God. That's insane. Yeah. Okay, so then you must have people that are just working on moving people around in platforms. Like, how do you actually get, how do you, like, ascend these people up? We have flows in place to move people. So cool. Do you do phone sales as well? Yeah. So we have 180 people call center in India, our own. And we land a lot of people on... We try to put people into IVR as much as we can. So 75 % of our inbound traffic lands on IVR, and 25 % lands on people, on the live agent.

50:00And that is handled by 180 agents, 24 hours. That handles about four different TV channels. So two UK, one Germany, and one US. Yes.

50:11How far out are you guys looking for new product categories? Because you mentioned you have OTB, so OTB being open to buy. Every sort of category manager has that. Strategically then, how are you directing where you want people to go explore? How do you figure out what's next? So I don't do that. So what we have is every product category has their own way to get their OTB increased. So they must make their spot. So if the productivity of the category is high, they get more airtime. So they can pick a new category if they think they can hit the number. Yeah, within their section, for example, home can put, they have the right to put, the freedom to pick new category within home if they want to.

51:00Katy Mimari:Do you have a design team here also that, like the buyer saying in home, we think these pillows are going to be very, then does it shift to a design team that's creating the product? Is it all in-house like that? So jewelry, we have full design team, merchandising and transporting. But for other products, we don't have design team. We have transporters, a few of them, but mostly we depend on vendors. We don't manufacture other than jewelry. So you go to the vendors and say, what's your best selling...? Or, we have seen this trend, we have something like this. So we have trendspotters, we don't have designers, we don't have those technical technicians in place, which apparel manufacturers have, we don't have them.

51:44But we have trendspotters who go along with merchants to the vendors and then discuss what their collection is, what we'd like to see, and then they have a program with them.

51:56Katy Mimari:I want to be a translator here. And that must, that has got to have changed over the years. Like, how to figure out where to go as a product. Yeah. Like, it's just so, you can, there's so much data now that we just never had before, like 46 years ago. Even before online, you probably sent people to market. Yeah. I went to stores all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And just took pictures on your camera, not your phone. Yeah. Right. And then you faxed it to your team. We bought new products. Yeah, yes. Send the pictures, nice pictures, and send all the factories. We did a lot of that. Now it's pretty much online.

52:27We're transporting sites. We're using AI. It's much easier now. Are there categories, when you look at the company, are there categories that you're like, that you wish you guys were in as a brand?

52:44Katy Mimari:Don't say baby in phone cases. That'll get weird real fast. It's fine. on TV anyway. Okay. Yeah. So since our team has such a freedom, I don't think that there's any category that I think we should be and we are not. I don't believe there's any. I think when you walk his warehouse, you're going to realize that there is not a product category. You literally sell everything? It's insane. Yeah. I remember the, I think that at ECF this year in our small group, you gave us the range of prices in your catalog and it's like as low as 20 bucks. $10 to$20 ,000. It's just crazy. It's insane. I have so many product questions.

53:28Katy Mimari:Can this be like a six-hour? Yeah, let's talk product. Yeah, screw it. Okay, one more. And then I really want to ask Sunil questions about his family too because I know how important it is to him. But when you talk about selling out of products and do you know what your return, not return customer rate is, but like what is the percentage of returns that just gets sent back? Depends on the product. So we know what product category returns would be. So we'll assess a product based on expected return rate and then what would be the net revenue. The TV typically is very high return rate because people buy on Impulse.

54:01Yeah, yeah. Very emotionally charged buy. On Impulse, they bought a$4 ,000 diamond ring. Yeah, yeah. And then when she talked to her husband, she said, husband says, honey. Oh, well, honey.

54:13Katy Mimari:Maybe you shouldn't have done that. That husband doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah. And they don't know how much value she's getting. She's getting so much, though. Spoken like the business owners. Yeah. So our return rate is approximately 18 % in the U.S. What do you do, though, if they return a ring that's sold out? What do you do with that ring? So if the ring is unused, then we would put it back for sale. And if it's an apparel or a beauty product which is used, then we just discard it. Is there like a closet here I can go through? No, you don't need to. Like a souvenir from my shop LC store.

54:53The entire group of companies, you're publicly traded, so you can say, what is the total size of the business today? Yeah. So last year we did$460 million revenue. But I look at the business not in terms of dollars as much as pieces sold, meals delivered. So we have 57 ,000 meals per school day. my hope and aim is to take it to a million meals per school day by 2040. That would mean that we need to grow 20 % or so something every year. Up until 2040. Okay. And do you imagine you're going to be the CEO? Do you hope you're going to be the CEO that long? I'll enjoy. I'll do as long as I enjoy and I'm able to.

55:36And if I'm not, I hope I create a successor who takes this forward as I'm passionate about.

55:45Katy Mimari:Could it be one of your boys? I doubt it. My older one is a successful tech entrepreneur and a younger one wants to follow his older brother. Of course he does. So, okay, so like go a little deeper on this. Did your kids work in the business at any point? Very early on when they were interning, they did. They were finding out those gemstones around the warehouse, and every gemstone they found, they would get 25 cents. That's so cool. The ultimate treasure hunt, right? That's how they made their pocket money. My sons never got pocket money ever. They had to make their money. But since the tech industry was more enticing for them, Sure.

56:35And they're both into that area quite deep. Go ahead.

56:39Katy Mimari:You told me one time, so we've had a lot of personal conversations about how you raise your children, right? When they have kind of, I mean, they live in this world where you're very successful. And you told me how you think about it. And, you know, is this something that you're going to gift your sons or, and you, I don't know if you want to share it or not, but you said that you set goals for your sons, and they have to hit a certain goal for you to be able to give. Do you know what you're talking about? Yeah. So, starting from how we brought them up, it was never really being expensive stuff for them.

57:15They had to buy their phones, they had to buy their own laptops, they had to buy their own tech equipment. We would only provide the education, best education, in their living and boarding and lodging, less they have to manage themselves. We would give them fortunes to earn, and then they did a good job at it. And other thing we bought in our family was not to say no to them. So that means not to reprimand them, and if they're doing something which is not good for them, just tell them the consequences of what they're doing, and then they're free to take the decision of what they want to do. So your kids are probably very high-age to see that.

57:56like they'll just go and do whatever that's why they don't want to come in my business no yeah of course yeah that's exactly why yeah it's like stay out of the family business it's incredible i i just

58:07Katy Mimari:the listening to him and how he's raised his family and his life we're talking about this on the way over here like how how do you actually raise entrepreneurial kids yeah like can you you know or are they just like are you just born a certain way you know how much of it is nature versus nurture. I was reflecting, Katie, if I look back at all of my friends that I grew up with, I'm like, why are some of them entrepreneurs and some of them aren't? Well, we were all raised so similarly. Yeah. So the nurture counts because my sons saw me talking about business all the time. And they were in the business earlier when they were interning.

58:43So they saw the business as well. So they must have got those thoughts of how to run a business and how to have relationships with people, employees and outside world. So that must have helped them. But everybody has to have their own ambition, own purpose in life. And they found their own purpose. And for that, they found their own path to serve their purpose. If you... I'm curious to see how you answer this. But if this company was to disappear tomorrow, would you start another one? as you are right now with everything you know? Probably. Yeah? Yeah, because I'm really enjoying what I do. I learn quite a bit every day.

59:31And biggest joy I get is to see people thrive within the organization and meet their goals, life goals, and really progress well in life. So that gives me a lot of pleasure. You must have, like, you talk a lot about people. Could you give me a sense for what the, like who are the people that you work with every day? Do you have like a leadership team that you spend most of your time with? Like how are things structured and how do you actually run a company this size? Yeah. So I have 12 people report to me and I talk to them once a week. Okay. And I have once a month review for each business. So I have geographical heads, US, UK, Germany, Asia.

1:00:16They are geographical leads. And then I have branding. innovation, and gemstones lead. So these are the seven leads, vertical leads. And then I have CFO, CHRO, and CTO. They report to me. And then I have EA. So 12 people report to me. Pretty much once a week, conversation with them. Review the reports, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. And once a month, business review that I do along with my CFO and other seniors.

1:00:46Katy Mimari:I would call Sunil a leader that stays in the weeds. Yeah. Oh, yeah, clearly. Yeah. He's not a sit back and watch and just, I mean, you dive in where needed. Yeah. And you enjoy it. Yeah, I dive in where needed because I have my fingers on the pulse, but I'm not, I don't want to be in the way of people managing the business. So I intervene only when I need to. Otherwise, I let people run the business, even if they make small mistakes, I let them learn from the mistakes. He's like the ultimate father. Can I send my children to you? I have a few. You'll spoil them? No. He'll spoil somebody else's kids.

1:01:29His kids, no, they're disciplined.

1:01:31Katy Mimari:They're disciplined, yeah. They'll send yours back with you. They'll send mine back worse than I gave them. But I never said no to them. Will you be okay with that? No, you can't grandpa them. I need you to father them. That is a difference between the two. There's a difference, yeah. Okay, I'm going to ask, I think this might be a dumb question, so bear with me. I'm back to the TV thing. How do you get people to watch the channel? How do you market the channel? You can't. We tried so many times to market us on different channels. Yeah. But people don't leave what they're watching to come and watch a shopping channel.

1:02:09It doesn't happen. So you have to depend on people surfing on channels and come across you or word of mouth. Do you have control? This is going to be super tactical. Do you have control over what shows up when somebody's clicking through the channel guide? No, it's live. No. It's the Black 24-7 live. So it's the same programming. So they have to discover you. You have to discover you. So, and your programming has to be engaging enough with enough movement on the screen and enough interest that they stick to you. So, for like the direct response, like your D2C advertisers that are going to listen to this or watch this, your live stream is basically a forever hook.

1:02:53Yes.

1:02:53Katy Mimari:And think about it. It's just like scrolling on TikTok or Instagram. That is freaking wild. But we used to scroll channels. And so, to stop and pause on a channel. Yeah, I remember like flipping through. Yeah. Right? It's just like... As a kid, like you're clicking through channels. For television, that's pretty much it. For online, you know the whole book, right? Was having this background in live shopping, has that actually helped in the transition to online, direct consumer, like Facebook, Google, these modern-day ad platforms? Has that been an easy transition, or has it been a completely different game?

1:03:30So you know the story about all the airlines in the world tried to become Southwest. None of them could. It's hard. So for me to become kind of Southwest, I had to become ECF member. We tried before without being in the weeds. I could not. So I had to really immerse myself into e-comm to become an e-comm player. And we are seeing that working out now. do you think that if you look at like this big hairy audacious goal that you have your BHAG being a million meals a day do you think that it's e-commerce that takes you there or do you see other channels and other things that you're going to have to do so e-com is the right next step for us I do not know how the world will evolve in the next 15 years they may come other channels as well and e-com may not be enough to get us there I do not know that.

1:04:30Katy Mimari:So you don't really know the roadmap. You're just keeping yourself open to opportunity. I love that. So you said 20 % per year. Do you just see that as like, this is just the appropriate growth rate? We've talked a lot about sort of growth rate on lots of episodes of the show. And like, where is the sweet spot in a consumer business? Because there's like, you know, financing inventory and there's a lot of working capital in your business. Is 20 the number that you're like, this is just the number that works really well for us? It's 20 % plus. It's not 20. So it's quite high number, but this is what we need.

1:05:08And sometimes we may have the spurt of growth by acquisition. Sometimes we may have spurt of growth by finding some great product, great channel, great time. So we do not know. I don't have full roadmap to get to Miriam. Yeah. So we're going with a BHAG with the idea we are open to any possibility or the platform, the product, or the strategy. I don't know fully. You know, what's nuts, I don't know if people do the public math. I hate public math, but I'm going to do it anyway. At$450 million, 20 % is like$90 million that you have to add to the business. Yeah, and it grows up every year. Every year it goes up.

1:05:48That feels like a lot of either, and most companies like this, it's either products, markets, or channels. do you... feels like you're going to have to go into more markets at some point. Sanyam Bhutaniya Could be. So for us, we are considering India as the next market. Japan is a possible market for us. Because the TV shopping is still pretty robust in Japan. So Japan and India are target markets now.

1:06:12Katy Mimari:How important is profitability as you grow up to a million? Sanyam Bhutaniya We look at the business from ROIC point of view, return on investment capital. And we constantly have a benchmark for any venture that we do. we look at that as a gold standard for us. So minimum ROIC we need for any, it's 20%. And if a business would give that return, we'd go into it. So you're managing growth, but also keeping an eye on the bottom line. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, you kind of have to as a public company. As a public company, you've got to have it. Is there something about this business that if you look back over time, that you would have thought like, this is impossible, but today you're like, I can't believe we actually do this.

1:06:57Yeah. So people thought that the jewelry business, you just can't delegate. Coming from India, very traditional-minded, every jeweler manages himself, closes a safe vault every night, opens a vault, pulls out the jewelry, and then let other people manage. So that was a difficult thing for people to absorb, except that you can delegate gemstone business and a jewelry business. But it worked. No kidding, it worked. Okay, so one of the things we like to do, because we're going to go, we're going to tour next. But before we do that, we like to finish on this segment we call the Titan 10. So I just have a bunch of questions I want to ask you.

1:07:44And I'm so curious your answers, given everything we've talked about, public company, how many divisions, how many markets, all the things. So I'm going to start. You ready? Sure. And as gut feel as you can. Okay. Okay. Go ahead. So the first one is you get to a desert island, right? You have to manage the business from a desert island, but you only get to look at three numbers every week. What are those three numbers? Revenue growth, customer growth, ROIC. I love the ROIC thing, by the way. You don't hear that very often in consumer. You also get to take a book, but it can't be about business.

1:08:20Which book are you bringing? I'm reading a book by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. His name is Nietzsche Tha Tha Han. And the book is, This is Your Home. And it's an impactful book. So I've not finished it. So if I were to go tomorrow, I'd be taking that. I love it. Are you a big reader just in general? Yeah. It sounds like it. That's an obscure sounding book. Can't promise I'm going to read that, Sunil. I'm going to be honest. If you go with me on the island, we just don't do it. Yeah, then we don't go. What is a belief about business that you feel you might have that is contrarian that other people might not agree with you on?

1:09:07Doing good is good for business. Actually, I think it's a great one. Because I think most people would actually disagree with you on that. I think you do good in business, then you go do good personally. They never mix. I like that. What is the single most important word in leadership? Listening skills. What's the single most important word in business?

1:09:39Empowerment. Best meal of the day, and why? Breakfast. I'm trying to put on some weight, So I'm not 14 after my workout. The opposite problem I have.

1:09:54Katy Mimari:I literally, Sunil, I wish somebody would just say, I need you to gain weight. I'd be like, I've been training for this my whole life. Dude, I'm a pro. I got you. Watch and learn. You look great, Sunil. Thank you. Right now, you know, you've been in ECF. You're in sort of like all of our network. What do you see? What is something that you see happening that you just think is really overrated? Maybe it's a growth tactic. It's something that people are doing. Media buying. I love that you said that so much. Thank you. And what's the most underrated thing?

1:10:35Team building. Yeah. Love it. Do you want to know why I think you're right on the media buying? Can I give you? I think Facebook ads made us all really bad marketers. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. But initially you had so much of manual process in Facebook. Now it's so much automated. So going after the top media buyer may not be the right thing. Going after the top product, top angle story is more valuable. That's it. It's like we've forgotten how to be good product people and great storytellers. And I think Facebook just trained us how to be good Facebook advertisers. We've got 20, whatever, 15 years of this.

1:11:16It's like we just forgot the other parts. Yeah. So thank you. I think we're a wrap.