End of Creativity Means End of Your Venture: GlobalBees CEO Nitin Agarwal Agarwal believes that while coming up with creative ideas is easy, it is important to understand whether they are practical, promise value and address a market need

Ideas for me are a healthy union of innovation and insight, said Nitin Agarwal, CEO, GlobalBees, a Thrasio-style startup that acquires e-commerce-first businesses with a successful presence on online marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart and helps them scale up.

Agarwal believes that while coming up with creative ideas is easy, it is important to understand whether they are practical, promise value and address a market need. "To generate viable ideas or concepts that have the potential to disrupt or deliver impact, it is crucial, to begin with, your target audience and deeply study and understand their requirements," he said.

FirstCry backed GlobalBees is a termination of one such idea that was discussed for nearly three years before the launch this year. The leadership team had multiple discussions on becoming a house of digital brands. And, when the timing was right, it dived right in.

After the pandemic, Indian D2C products started making a huge impact in the country and abroad and the team felt it was time to give wings to its idea. "The timing was right to bring in vertical expertise and build a house of online brands," said Aggarwal.

In July this year, the company raised $150 Mn in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A led by the parent company FirstCry and some of its investors. Last month, it made its first acquisition of sustainable home care products company The Better Home. In an interview with BIZ Experiences India before the acquisition, the company mentioned that it was in active discussion and evaluation of over 30 brands and foresaw at least 50 brands being nurtured under its umbrella in the next 24 months.

"Research has proven that brands that leveraged customer behavior data outperformed the competition by 85% in sales growth and 25% in gross margin. To simply put it - Data is revenue, and the more you leverage data to understand your customer base, the better are the chances of success," Aggarwal said.

Having said that, Aggarwal strongly believes that in today's cutthroat business world, the end of creativity means the end of your idea/venture and to stay relevant, deliver value constantly and lead, it is important to reinvent strategies by creatively leveraging the data.

"Two companies in the same domain may have the same insights and data, but how they implement these insights in business can mean success or failure; one will emerge a leader, and another will become a follower, depending on how smartly and creatively their teams can act on these insights," he said.

Additionally, Aggarwal also feels that creativity should resonate well with the customer, deliver on the business's reputation and business goals in addition to placing the company ahead of the competition.

"It's the balance that counts!," he said.