Brand Leaders : Gopa Kumar, Chief Operating Officer, Bhima Jewels

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Education
MBA

Career history
•A retail professional with over 26 years’ experience across various formats and channels of retail, across multiple geographies.
•Retail journey started with Shoppers’ Stop in the year 1999 when retail was still a nascent industry with few operators in the sector.
•Subsequently, took up an assignment with Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
•In the previous role at Future Retail as the Business Head – South, he was managing the food and grocery formats.

Role & responsibilities
Business Operations, P&L, Growth & Expansion, Technology, Marketing and Business Development

Strengths & weaknesses
Strengths:
• Leadership
• Innovation
• Strategic mindset
Weaknesses:
• Perfectionist
• Emotionally driven
• Impatient

Aspiration
Modernize jewellery category with best-in-class retail ecosystem.

Game changing retail technologies
• Augmented Reality (AR) shopping for jewellery
• Gamiȱ cation of Marketing Promotions
• Omni Channel
• Adopting technology across the retail ecosystem (L&D, Operation Management, Consumer Feedback program, Digital shopping)

Skills that helped you succeed
Industry experience, communication skills, execution, people skills, technology understanding and quick learner.

Lessons learned
• Consumer insights – thinking from the consumer’s perspective on business challenges.
• Retail shop floor understanding – spending quality time at the retail store front, interacting with frontend colleagues.
• Data – data-driven planning helps you measure results
and effectiveness of campaigns.

On the future of industry
• Retail Industry will be digitally driven across formats; consumers will shop across formats with a split purchase basket.
• Our view of consumer and enriched database will be the winning formula along with evolving merchandising practices.

Role model
Mr. B S Nagesh, Chairman Shopper Stop Ltd., Founder– TRRAIN

Learning from your career
• Timely decision making is most critical for positive business outcome.
• Clarity of communication and expectation from team members well defined yields best results.
• Ability to correlate consumer insights with data insights to identify trends and influence business strategy.

Life mantra
Inspire others or retire

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