Hari Menon – The man who changed India’s way of grocery shopping

Out of all the success stories you have heard, probably the most enthralling ones would be where a middle-class man, after facing a plethora of challenges in his life, made his mark in the world. Today, we will tell you about one such person, who never gave up on his dreams and became an inspiration to many young entrepreneurs. We are talking about the CEO and co-founder of BigBasket, Hari Menon.

Who knew that one day you will get your groceries delivered at your doorstep in just a click? Well, Menon along with his four other partners made it possible by launching BigBasket.

The 58-year-old always had an urge to experiment and try out something new. Eventually, his quest for learning more and more finally led him to becoming a successful man in the e-commerce world.

Who is Hari Menon?

Hari Menon might not be the richest entrepreneur of India, but he certainly is one of the most successful ones. Born in 1963 in Bandra West, Mumbai into a middle-class family, Menon had big dreams, just like every ordinary man, to be one of the bests and carving out a niche for himself in the world of entrepreneurs. But he didn’t have enough money to experiment with his ideas.

Alumnus of BITS Pilani, Menon started his professional career as a Business Head with Wipro. He had also been an integral part of many companies, including Serus Corporation, Tumri, and Timeli. Gradually, he gained a lot of experience and knowledge about the business world by working in different corporate companies which later came handy to him.

The success you know, the story you don’t

It all started in 1999, when Menon along with his four partners, Abhinay Choudhari, V S Sudhakar, Vipul Parekh and V S Ramesh started an online platform, Fabmart which, as he puts it, performed the same functions that Flipkart does today. However, at that time, online shopping was not a popular concept among Indians. Hence, the company failed to reap the rewards.

With Fabmart’s failure, Menon and his business partners decided to shift their focus towards another venture, Fabmall. Fortunately, it worked pretty well for them and gave Menon extra time to strategize his next start-up. It also helped that internet penetration in India saw a big boom, allowing online businesses to flourish. And thus, in October 2011, Hari Menon with his other four partners Co-founded BigBasket.

Building BigBasket

Just like every other start-up, BigBasket has also gone through all sorts of business challenges and difficulties in its journey of success. And the biggest challenge for Menon and his team was to maintain the capacity of the products to meet customer’s demand. But they successfully pulled it off and were able to grab the attention of people.

As they say it’s all worth it in the end. Growing slowly and steadily, the company also went on to improve its delivery output and eventually became a household name in the online grocery shopping circuit.

Notably, BigBasket made it presence felt in smaller cities as well as in small towns when they roped in famous Bollywood actor, Sharukh Khan, as their brand ambassador.

In the past 18 months, BigBasket has launched three new businesses – BBDaily, BB Instant and BB Beauty Store.

Currently, the online grocery store delivers in these cities – Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Noida, Vijayawada-Guntur, Mysore, Coimbatore, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Vadodara, Vishakhapatnam, Lucknow, Kanpur, Gurgaon, Surat, Nagpur, Chandigarh, Patna, and Indore.

The secret behind BigBasket’s success

The key to BigBasket’s success lies in the constant innovation by using technology and unmatched customer service. Most importantly, the credit of BigBasket’s success goes to Hari Menon and his partners’ extensive experience in the business world and their better understanding of the subtle nuances related to online marketing, as compared to their competitors.

Today, BigBasket obtains more than 45,000 orders in a day and have a team of 14000 members with a base of five million customers.