The Meesho Way
By Ishita Aggarwal, Content Analyst
With the major aim of empowering women to operate successful home-based business and helping people become self-employed, two IIT Delhi Graduates Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, developed Meesho in 2015 to give life to their idea. Meesho is an Indian social commerce platform enabling small businesses and individuals to establish their own online stores and kick-start their business by reselling products to their network via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram etc.
(Founder CEO) said “Meesho” stands for “Meri Shop”(My E-shop) or apni dukaan whose essence traces back to the thought of enabling people to own a shop of their own. The analogy can be better understood through this. Just like people have their retail shop, meesho enables you to establish your own shop/business on social media, build customers, develop a brand name, and sell your products with the help of the tools provided by Meesho without any initial investment. This idea was further ignited by a meeting with a local shop owner in Koramangala who was already leveraging social media to sell his product. The shop owner would upload product pictures to whatsapp groups through which the customers would place the orders. The employees would then make the delivery and collect the cash.
Meesho’s founders realized early-on that there may exist many individuals in tier 2 and 3 cities who wish to start their own business, but do not have access to capital. This is what drove Meesho’s prototyping process, where resellers can make profits early on without investing a dime. Meesho currently boasts of more than 17 million resellers, 15 million of which are women, and over 60,000 suppliers who majorly cater to first-time online shoppers. It has been developed to provide an efficient platform for SME suppliers and social resellers to bring the e-commerce revolution in India, coupled with a personalized experience for consumers. Just when social commerce was struggling with issues like limited access to supply, lack of logistics/ payment options, customer friendly policies in India, Meesho was quick to build reliability and lead the way.
Being one of the first three Indian startups to ever be selected by Y Combiator to participate in its three-month summer program in 2016, Meesho has been winning awards and breaking new grounds since its inception. The pandemic boosted the growth of Meesho’s business. A recent funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp has made Meesho India’s largest unicorn where the social commerce platform managed to raise $300 million and is valued at $2.1 billion, a threefold jump from its previous funding round of $125 million in 2019. Having championed the reseller model catalyzed by successful funding, Messho has clearly established itself as the third-largest e-commerce company after Walmart and Amazon.
