In our series on Company Feature, today we are showcasing excitingLives.com, a company that aims to help India become a superpower, and help put man on Mars! They are one of India’s leading online boutiques retailing eclectic merchandise and fabulous experiences. Devendra Singh of RetailBiz had a one on one with Nisheeth Srivastava who is the founder of the company.
About excitingLives..
Excitinglives.com is one of India’s leading online boutiques retailing eclectic merchandise and fabulous experiences. As a business we appeal to one’s sensory cravings rather than fulfillment of utilitarian needs. The store was initially launched with a plethora of extraordinary gift experiences such as Race a Formula 1 car, Be a Supermodel, Fly a real F-16 Fighter Jet, Private invitation to the Playboy Mansion party in Los Angeles, etc. We then went on to add some really cool personalized products, and then a variety of more awesome products – sometimes adventurous, often romantic, frequently naughty, but always unique. The store is vibrant and youthful and has a playful attitude.
For us the underlying theme has always been fun, romance and adventure. We love what we do and it is almost never about the monotone of keeping millions of products at mind-numbing (and frequently fake) discounts. It is about creativity, curation and design in most of what we do. Our passion reaches our customers who keep coming back for more and keep us in business. We also work with corporate customers on fun and creative mandates when the usual corporate gifting world fails to excite much interest in their own ecosystem.
Something about your initial days..
The one thing we were absolutely sure of doing when we started was process automation, business intelligence and real-time reporting, as well as keep the web front-end designed beautifully, reflecting premium imagery. We also kept on making our web store feature-rich, and to date I believe we have one of the most friendly online stores in the industry. For example, one can find out which of their Facebook friends have birthdays coming up over the next month, so they can plan to buy a present for them if they want to. People can create wish-lists and a reminder database for those whose friends and family are not on Facebook – certainly my parents aren’t on Facebook! We’re now working to make that experience even most spectacular and that is driving our mobile commerce strategy. As with earlier initiatives, we think we’ll usher in a fresh shopping experience when that app gets launched.
About your customer support and customer experiences..
We might have some of the most extraordinary customer engagement anecdotes in the business, because we’re selling dreams tailored to the individual. We’ve have our clients begin to cry with happiness when they were being pampered as a supermodel, others threatening us when the limousine they’d ordered couldn’t turn into their narrow lane, couples asking their friends to chase their Hot Air Balloon flight in their cars so they don’t drift away and get lost, and yet others who’d call us to just tell us how they love what we have and how we can add many other things, and oh, can I have a job in your dreamy company? It is no wonder then that most of our customers call us as friends rather than to scream at an agent, and that is such a delight.
About your current state and future plans..
We think that we occupy a pride of place in the niche we operate in. We had so many temptations along the way to add regular merchandise like books, apparel and electronics, but we have stuck to our core belief in building something differentiated, exclusive and delightful. End of the day, our brand and relationship matters to our clients. We are not fake discount merchants or a whimsical fly-by-night operator – that is a different concept and has its own large space. People buy from us repeatedly because we appeal to their sense and sensibility, and that’s a relationship that’ll endure over time. The good news is, we’ll prevail because we know how to work and party using monies earned the hard way!
Right to this date we’re growing comfortably, trebling our orders each year. At the current rate we believe we’ll grow 8x-10x in the next 3 years on our own. We look well after our people, continue being bootstrapped, are profitable and have no external debt, and I think we’ll be one of the rare online institutions to have managed that consistently over the years. We’re in this for the long haul, have demonstrated our passion for the business niche and our clients’ requirements, and its only getting better every passing day. We will look for strategic resource capital when we’re ready, Indian or international, to ensure we continue to present extraordinary products that people really, really want.
