M

SUCHI MUKHERJEE
ukherjeeA Journey from eBay to LimeRoadPublished On: Friday, June 19, 2015Views
7175

The 42-year old,

Suchi Mukherjee is presently the proud founder of LimeRoad.com a portal that targets the

women audience, is a fun and exciting way to discover, share and shop lifestyle products!
A women of substance that Suchi is, always envisioned of building and growing businesses that are focused on
simple yet powerful consumer products, and she has successfully brought this dream to life not only in the past but
most recently at LimeRoad as well.
She could see that online product discovery was a grave problem amongst many Indian women and wanted to do
something about it. With LimeRoad, she not only fulfils her dream of creating the most extensive delightful
discovery platform for lifestyle products, but also solves a pain-point for many.
Personally, she has completed her Bachelors in Arts with specialization in Economics and Maths from the University
of Cambridge and also holds a Masters Degree in Finance & Economics from the London School of Economics.
Being a married woman with two children, Suchi not only has managed to achieve what she wanted to, but has also
become an inspiration for thousands of young women who wish to pursue their dreams and work for change.

Life as an employee
Suchi began her career soon after she completed her Masters!
The first company she chose to begin her journey with was Lehman Brothers Inc in July 1998, as their new Senior
Associate for Corporate Finance. She continued working for them for more than 5 years and focused on sectors
including Telecoms Media Technology and Financial Institutions.
After she gained the desired knowledge, she decided to move elsewhere, to grab onto the opportunities that were
yet to be opened and in June 2003, she joined Virgin Media as a Director for Change & Business Development. She
was also the member of their Consumer Division Management Team.
Suchi worked with them for almost 2 years and then took one of the wisest decisions of her life; She quit Virgin
Media and joined eBay!

This jump not only helped her grow in terms of position but also gave her immense & first-hand knowledge of the
functionings of business.
She joined the company first as the Head of Business Seller Programs & CS in the year 2006 and was the member
of the UK Operating Management Team as well. With the way she performed, she was quickly promoted within a
year, as the Director and Member of Executive Management Team for Skype, which back then was a part of eBay
Inc.
Her responsibilities now also included planning, product / UI design, payments of the product a.k.a. Skype and also
looking after its marketing including brand, channels incl. PR and CS. This was altogether a different learning curve
for Suchi. Being a part of the executive management team; here is where she actually learned the powerful
leadership development skills. She got the priceless opportunity to see the transition of a start-up from founderled
and with 3 CEO changes in just 2 years. Not to forget the drastic upgradation of the product.
If this was fascinating, then what came next would sweep you off your feet!
After giving almost two years to Skype; she once again got the opportunity to get promoted as the new Managing
Director for Gumtree, which again was a part of eBay Inc.
I guess universe was covertly training her to start something great of her own! Because Gumtree being a start-up;
Suchi had again got the opportunity to build and grow a company but this time, with her own hands and leadership
skills.
Now Gumtree required a transformational leadership, and in her whole stint with them, she spent most of the time
scaling the team capabilities, product, sales, marketing and CS functions, and at the same time Suchi also restructured the financials towards core revenue streams.
And with 13-million users, she went on to grow it to UKs largest horizontal classifieds business in just two years.
She lifted the company from a No. 3 position to a market leading position in jobs and consumer-to-consumer car
sales, and also grew the visits by 35% YOY.
Once that was done, she decided to move on and do something of her own!

Life as an entrepreneur
Now although she was working for one of the most reputed organizations and was literally living the dream of
many, but she still felt that she wasnt justifying her ambitions.
She desperately wanted to do something of her own, something which could fill the gap in the society, something
that would fulfil the needs of many and to so she built LimeRoad.com!
To give you a fair idea; LimeRoad is simply a social-commerce platform that targets the woman audience of today
and makes it fun and exciting to discover, share and shop from their vast list of products.
The site provides a range of some of the most innovative, unique and interesting lifestyle products across
categories like apparel, accessories, home and non-perishable food collected from carefully selected retailers.

Interestingly, it has a unique concept of 100% user generated content which is created by its scrapbooking
community and is exclusive to LimeRoad. That means all the products that you see on the site are manufactured by
the users of the site itself called the scrapbooking community.
This innovative scrapbook application gives people the leverage to choose from their range of products, create a
unique look, share it with their friends and can also sell their curated looks & earn out of it. So basically on
LimeRoad anyone & everyone is a stylist.

I. Ideation
Surprisingly, the idea of LimeRoad.com was born out of a moment of utter frustration she was reading a glossy
magazine in London and found a piece of jewellery that she liked, and wanted to buy it, but because it was from
some small store in Mumbai, it obviously wouldnt have reached to her anytime soon.
That is when she realised two very important things:
1.

There was no consumer technology that made the discovery of lovely accessories and products easy and
entertaining. You know, just like reading a magazine, and flipping pages or photos in an album.

2.

And most importantly, there was no platform from which one could access the lists of products that were
manufactured and shipped out of India, one of the worlds largest manufacturing hubs. Basically, India remained
disconnected from the virtual world.
That is when the idea started to build up in her head!
She wanted to build a platform where one could find gorgeous, affordable lifestyle products in an extremely easy to
discover interface. She being a woman, knew that women love the different and out-of-the-box stuff, and that
product discovery in lifestyle was indeed a very hard problem to solve.
What made her even more confident was that India back then accounted for more than 21% manufacturing of
lifestyle products of world (thats 21% of a nearly $1 trillion industry). And she wanted to capitalize on this
untapped opportunity. Her aim was to simply bring all the vendors who produce high quality affordable products
under one roof, via an easy to use interface to enable the discovery.
Once she was clear in the head with the idea; she flew down to India!
Returning back to her home-ground; Suchi first met her friend Ankush Mehra, Head of Supply Chain Reliance
Hypermarkets, to understand the difficulties of setting up a business in India and to rope him in as his first cofounder.
Next was her meeting with Prashant Mallik Ex-Facebook, Microsoft & Siemens. He had flown down to India after 17
years, again with a dream to build something of his own. And obviously he joined the team as their techie cofounder.
They also roped-in a few other people like: Ahti Heinla as their Technical Advisor (past: Founding Architect of Skype)
& Michael V Swaaij as their Advisor (past: ex-Chairman of Skype)
And with that they hit it off! LimeRoad went live in October 2012!

II. Challenges
Now just like every start-up; LimeRoad too faced their share of challenges, during their initial stages. Even though
these werent that major, but when coming from a totally different business atmosphere, these can really get into
ones head.
At the very beginning, finding the right people to build a solid team which was a combination of skill and can-do
attitude was one of the biggest challenges for LimeRoad. Although this problem did get solved eventually, but it
does tend to popup every now and then!
Another thing that pestered them a lot was, getting the right kind of infrastructure with high- speed & reliable
internet.
Other than that; complex bank process, getting the company registered with the RoC (Registrar of Companies)
process, and other legal formalities were also something that turned out to be very different from what they had
seen.
Anyways, some of these got sorted then and there, while some are still going on; but they decided to move on,
because as they say Life goes on!

III. Growth & Development

Moving ahead; their revenue model was pretty much simple: they made money when vendors sell i.e. commission
revenue (% of sales). Hence, they started off by focusing on building an amazing product.
They also went out of their comfort zone to build strong partnerships with a really rich selection of brands and with
categories like apparel, accessories, home and food, LimeRoad was being presented to be a womans me time,
but online.
They launched with many brands, out of which nearly half were exclusively available with them. These included
national and international mega brands in their flagship form, Home-grown brands by exporters of world-classproducts, etc. such as 5elements, Vedas, Fuchsia, Anuva, Desi Weaves, Kshitij, Allen Solly, Forever 16, Trendz, and
many more.

And since then; the platform has grown from 250,000+ units of unique user generated visual content per month,
and 600+ vendors; to posting of 200,000+ unique products and looks per month by the users, and becoming
Indias leading discovery platform for lifestyle products with 18 million products.
Additionally, they recently rolled out their new Android app and in no time have got 100,000+ downloads with users
returning 7 times/ month, and mobile now accounts for 60% of users and revenues as well. Because of such
developments, their revenues have also doubled in the last 4 months with zero marketing strategies.
With a strong team of 200+ IIT-techies to NIFT-design geeks, LimeRoad stands tall with 1.5 million scrapbooks
posted by users so far, and 100,000 scrapbooks made per day. Their Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) has also
grown by a massive 600% since their launch.
The company now aims to reach out to 400m+ smartphones by around in 2016, out of which 30-50% belonging to
women.
Talking about funding; the company has raised a total of whopping $50 Million from Tiger Global, Lightspeed
Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India and a few others. Their most recent funding includes the series C round of
$30 Million, before which they had raised $15 Million and $5 Million, in series B & series A respectively.

Achievements
Voted 1 of 15 Rising Talent global leaders under 40 at World Womens Forum Global Womens Forum

Limeroad Founder Suchi Mukherjee Biography, Career, Marriage, Net Worth

When you talk of women entrepreneurs, there are only a handful of them in our country. The recent
wave of new change that our country is overseeing, this phenomenon is changing. Suchi Mukherjee, a
women entrepreneur who has been constantly proving with her achievements that it is completely
not a gender based space where a few years ago only males dominated. Who is Suchi Mukherjee? You
must be wondering. Suchi Mukherjee is the founder of Limeroad website, which lets you discover,
share and shop women lifestyle products. Suchi Mukherjee wiki will further tell you about her journey
throughout her life, her struggles, her career, and other interesting facts about Suchi Mukherjee.

Suchi Mukherjee Date of Birth

Suchi Mukherjee date of birth is a little unclear but she was born in the year 1973 and was 39 year old
when she founded her famous fashion portal for women I.e. Limeroad.com. From a young age, she has
been involved in scaling up many businesses and starting some on her own, which is quite ambitious
for a person like her. Suchi Mukherjee birthday has always been a sumptuous affair among her elite
friends and family.

Suchi Mukherjee Family Background

Suchi Mukherjee belongs to a middle class family from Haryana. Since she had been married and went
on to work at some of the great companies we know, even founding her own, it has been a dream life
for her. Suchi Mukherjee family now consists of her husband, two kids and herself. Her parents must
have played a huge role in her success, and so must her husband, Suchi Mukherjee family have
contributed highly in what she is today.

Suchi Mukherjee Education

Suchi Mukherjee has sought education from the famed University of Cambridge and London School of
Economics. Suchi Mukherjee completed her bachelor in arts specializing in economics and
mathematics from the University of Cambridge. She has learned all the trades of business by doing her
masters in economics and finance from one of the most prestige business schools in the world which is
London School of Economics. The biography of Suchi Mukherjee details more of her personal as well as
professional life, keep reading.

Suchi Mukherjee Personal Life

For a business woman like Suchi Mukherjee, her work life and personal life is hard to differentiate. She
tries to give enough time to her family as well as friends even in her ultra busy startup life. Suchi
Mukherjee net worth is not disclosed in the media however it must be quite high considering her
stature as a founder of a successful startup and previous employee in some of the best companies in
the world. Suchi Mukherjee contact details are the ones given on the LimeRoad website as well as in
her LinkedIn profile, you can mail her. Suchi Mukherjee biography further shows how she went on from
working in various companies to founding one on her own.

Suchi Mukherjee Career

With such a brilliant portfolio of companies under her belt, Suchi Mukherjee success story might seem
as if everything happened overnight without any struggle. The reality is completely different; she too
had to face ups and downs throughout her professional life. At first being a part of newly formed
companies to scale them up and making them global and starting a company of her own which has
become highly successful is no easy job. After completing her bachelors and masters degree from
University of Cambridge and London School of economics respectively, she soon started working as a
professional right after completing her studies.
She started working at Lehman Brothers Inc. in 1998 in a position of Senior Associate for Corporate
Finance. It was Suchi Mukherjee first job in her career. She worked there for 5 years until moving on to
her next company in her career. She focused highly on Telecoms Media technology and Financial
Institutions while she worked there. After leaving the company with a rich experience, she moved on to
work with Virgin Media from June 2003 as a Director of Change and Business Development. Also, she
was highly consumer focused in Virgin Media and was a member of Consumer Division Management
Team.
She worked with Virgin media for 2 whole years and then switched over her career path again to eBay,
which was one of the best e-commerce platforms available. With eBay, she learnt many skills that
would later be handy in her own venture. Also this change in companies helped her work in diversified
conditions across many companies. In the year 2006, Skype was a part of eBay then, which is now
property of Microsoft. With the phenomenal work she did, Suchi Mukherjee was soon promoted to
Director and Member of Executive Management Team of Skype. She oversaw the major overhaul that
Skype went through in its earlier stage and made it what it is now. There were structural concerns over
the company as 3 CEOs were changed in mere 2 years.

After empowering Skype with her skills, she was again promoted to a position of Managing Director of
Gumtree, which was a child company of eBay Inc. After all this years, she had become reliant enough
to start something on her own and take it off. She took Gumtree to great heights and made it a market
leader in UK. After successfully handling companies of this scale, she set out to do something of her
own and founded LimeRoad, which is her own venture. She is also the CEO of LimeRoad website. It has
received various rounds of funding and can sustain the business as it is now which is highly
commendable as very few startups become successful.

Interesting facts about Suchi Mukherjee

1.
2.
3.

She lifted the company Gumtree from No.3 to No.1 in a matter of few years.
She started her working career at a young age of 22 in Lehman Brothers Inc.
She was one of the most promoted people in eBay Inc because of her brilliant managerial and
business skills.

Suchi Mukherjee Love Life

Is Suchi Mukherjee Married? Yes, she is. Though there is not much information about Suchi Mukherjee
husband but she is happily married having her own family. Talking about Suchi Mukherjee children, she
has two kids. Suchi Mukherjee dating someone was all false news as we never came to know about
Suchi Mukherjee boyfriend. She has been happily married from a past few years and living in Haryana
with her family. This was all about the life of Suchi Mukherjee. Explore the next biography of
Singer Ankit Tiwari