Assistant Program Manager Debarshi Som on the value of unlearning & how he helped grow the Beauty category at Meesho

Meeshoite Debarshi Som knows more about the taxonomy of lipsticks than even his mother or cousin, he tells us. This is because Debarshi and his manager Milan Partani have been part of growing the Beauty category at Meesho. And a big chunk of understanding and solving for the category came from deep diving into the world of lipsticks and other beauty and skincare products for Debarshi, and this helped him understand the market. When he is not obsessing about cosmetics, he loves to travel and cook up a storm in the kitchen. Currently Assistant Program Manager — O/R, Debarshi loves to solve tough problems at Meesho and always goes back to the sounding board — meaning — our resellers for important lessons in business. Let’s hear from him about his life at Meesho

Over to Debarshi!

I was born in Imphal but thanks to my father’s transferable job, we were moving every three years to a new city in India. The flipside was that I had to leave my friends behind every few years, but being on the move helped me grow up with a cosmopolitan outlook, gave me an exposure to different cultures, embrace new experiences, and of course all kinds of food (I love food and also cooking). We moved back to Calcutta in 2005 and from then on I completed my schooling there and moved on to Haldia Institute of Technology in West Bengal to study engineering.

I got placed to Amazon straight out of college in 2015 and landed in Bangalore. At Amazon, I joined as an Associate and was working with seller support functions. My stint there included not only responsibilities as an associate but also I grew to be a mentor for new associates and played a small role in the training and development team. My time at Amazon made me comfortable because of several perks associated with the job and responsibilities cut out exactly. But there I became a bit complacent, which is when I started looking out for new opportunities.

I wanted to grow as a Program Manager in the field and I knew that I needed to learn and work from the ground up for that.

While Amazon gave me that platform, it would have taken me awhile to get there. So I thought why not try a company still in the growth stage and try to not only grow in it but also to see how your contribution takes it to its growth path as well.

I joined Meesho in March 2019 as a Key Accounts Manager, and immediately started handling a category called Toys, followed by Health & Wellness and then eventually Beauty. I brought in my experience of Amazon categories to Meesho. I started off my handling suppliers and accounts, but then I also found myself focusing a lot on the analytical part of growing the category and managing processes.

The beauty department

My manager Milan and I joined Beauty at the same time. We began by doing a lot of work to increase the top of the funnel — to increase the supply and also to figure out how to market the category on the app. After filtering and picking out quality suppliers, our next task was how to increase the number of orders and how to scale the category itself. But how did two men manage to infiltrate a woman’s domain of expertise? When we started, our idea of cosmetics was only what a lipstick, powder and cream was. But if you ask me today, I think I can give you a discourse on the category of lipsticks, makeup or skincare — what are the different kinds of lipsticks in the markets, what are the bestsellers, and I know the taxonomy of lipsticks like the back of my hand. I had to learn all of this on the job because at Meesho one of our core values is to deep dive and solve problems. We also did a lot of data crunching to understand the market and products.

Fun fact: Matte lipsticks sell more than regular ones, and ladies love red or maroon more than purple!

In resellers we trust

Experimenting with a whole bunch of products and pushing it to our Meesho entrepreneurs (resellers) to see if it works, helped us understand the kind of supply pipeline we need. Once we got the supply, the next part was to increase our orders per day. That’s where Meesho’s Listen or Die programme came in handy. We then went back to our resellers. I think it is very important for any customer centric company to listen to its customers, and this is something I can vouch for, especially in Meesho Category too. We called up a lot of resellers for a week or two to get feedback from them and understand their issues related to our category. A persistent feedback we received was about the quality of the products. Cosmetics as a category works on a very touch and feel factor, and customers would love to go to an offline store and actually try something before buying (though Nykaa defeated this thinking to a large extent).

We had to make sure that customers understood that we were offering quality products and who better to vouch for our products than our Meesho entrepreneurs.

We grew the rating of our products based on quality, thanks to reseller feedback and our category also grew by a significant percentage. The growth Beauty has seen is commendable and now it also houses Health & Wellness, a category I started with initially.

After contributing to the scaling of Beauty, I was promoted to Assistant Program Manager and I moved with my manager towards managing the Non Fashion category including electronics, home & kitchen and soft furnishings and men’s products. Strategy execution and problem solving are the most exciting parts of my job. We have often gone to the root of a problem to understand quality issues, and have set out to build a pipeline from yarn to delivery (for instance for bedsheets), and solving some of those low hanging fruits (such as mentioning size specifications for bedsheets on the app or what fabric it is made of). This helped us solve the problem of quality returns by a big margin. Currently, I am the Assistant Program Manager for the entire Non Fashion pod and work on creating end-to-end pipelines, build processes and how to scale and run programmes successfully.

Growing up in Meesho

Making our resellers successful is a core principle everyone lives by at Meesho and it is our True North, but I personally respect the value of Taking Ownership a lot. To me, taking charge and building something in a fast paced and unstructured environment has a lot of exciting possibilities and impactful outcomes.

I have had a pretty good growth at Meesho, and was promoted within three months of my joining the company, right at the start of my career. Going forward I can see a lot of opportunities for me, but they won’t be handed out to me on a platter. I will have to earn them, But I am ready to do that.

One of my biggest takeaways at Meesho is that you have to unlearn to take things forward, and then learn new things and implement those. I have also learnt to look at data very rigorously at Meesho, because every data point tells you something, every story has a meaning to it, and if you can make sense out of it, then you can build a lot of things.

Want to join Debarshi and team Meesho in creating 20 million entrepreneurs in 2020? then apply here. We are hiring!