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Businessfortnight had an interview with, Shashwat Deish co-founder, Powerhouse91. Talking about his start-up and idea to help new start-ups to take a step ahead to achieve their objective, Shashwant shared his keen observation about the market and e-commerce. In an interview with our Business journalist Akhil Gore, Shashwat also shared the story of Powerhouse91 his own brand and how they are connecting to people for identifying and acquiring such high-potential E-commerce brands in India accelerating their growth multifold in upcoming years.
Insight to the full interview:
Sir, what is Powerhouse91 is all about?
The idea behind Powerhouse91 was born out of the realization that while taking an E-commerce brand from zero to one is difficult enough, scaling it to the next level comes with its own set of challenges, and brand owners may not always have access to the right kind of resources, infrastructure, and expertise required to overcome the same. As a result, a lot of brands are unable to fulfill their real growth potential.
The founding team at Powerhouse91 came together to launch Powerhouse91 with the aim of identifying and acquiring such high-potential E-commerce brands in India and accelerating their growth multifold, thereby directly contributing to the next wave of growth in Indian E-commerce. How the idea for Powerhouse91 came into your mind, and what’s its USP.
Powerhouse91 was started with a very simple vision – helping eCommerce brands grow according to their true potential through significant growth capital combined with deep functional expertise across Supply Chain, Marketing, and Technology. One of the differentiating aspects about Powerhouse91 compared to other Ecommerce roll-up companies is that it was started by people who have themselves gone through the journey of building consumer brands doing multiple crores in revenue within a year from its inception. Guided by the same operations focussed work culture, Powerhouse91 has built multiple proprietary tools, growth frameworks, and business processes to help any acquired brand grow 15-20x over the next 5 years whil maintaining healthy profit margins.
Your company is only helping e-commerce to grow or other start-ups too?
We primarily partner with e-commerce businesses, however, we also leverage our network to make relevant connections in the startup ecosystem. We also actively work with manufacturers in India and China.
What are your further plans for scaling up your company?
Powerhouse91 plans to continue on its course of identifying and acquiring high-potential consumer brands across the different categories. At the same time, the company intends to focus heavily on growing its existing family of brands through various levers, with the vision of establishing several of its brands as category leaders, and in many cases, category creators.
What do you think about, this new start-up culture wave in India?
Over the years, a range of factors has accounted for the immense growth of Indian startup ecosystem. Some of them include the internet penetration, affordable mobile access, creation of digital infra such as UPI and KYC, the exits through IPOs, huge investments and finally some sectoral trends such as D2C Companies. India will see a lot of upcoming startups with unique value propositions and innovative products for the market.
Being an entrepreneur how difficult it was for you to come into a competitive market, with your panel of experts.
Before starting Powerhouse91, I was myself a seller on marketplaces and was running a brand ‘Azah’ which caters to women hygiene products and directly competes with giants like Whisper and Stayfree in India. Competing with such giants is not easy but we were determined to get a premium better sanitary pad for women in India. Azah getting such an enormous response gave us the confidence to start a house of brands. The idea is to bring together brands under one roof and sell innovative home products for every Indian household.
What will be your advice for initial eCommerce brands, who want to grow into the market?
My advice for early-stage brands would be to focus on their product and find the product-market fit. If the product is right for the market then the journey becomes less difficult. The brand should also focus on marketing and the supply chain for scale. It’s difficult it makes a profitable brand when you have ambitions of scaling the business thus founders should be clear on how they should approach the market.
