Saggi, renowned for her work with BabyChakra and the GoodGlamm Group, has launched Edition, a venture aimed at creating globally defining consumer appliance brands from India. With a focus on leveraging India’s manufacturing strengths and blending hardware with intuitive software design, Edition seeks to redefine daily living experiences for international markets, starting with the US.
Meanwhile, Kumar, the co-founder of upGrad, has pivoted his expertise in education and workforce development into BorderPlus. This new venture tackles the pressing global need for skilled manpower by training and deploying Indian talent—particularly in healthcare—to international markets. With India’s youthful population and the world’s demand for skilled professionals, Kumar envisions a solution that bridges employment gaps, drives remittances, and elevates individual lives.
Both entrepreneurs are setting their sights high, confronting challenges, and navigating complex markets, showcasing what it means to build from India for the world.
Below are the excerpts of the discussion.
Q: A lot has changed in the last 10 years. Let’s start with where we are in 2024. Baby Chakra to your venture with Darpan at MyGlam and now this new venture that you have decided to do, what is this new venture about and where does the drive and energy to startup all over again come from?
Saggi: The new venture called “Edition” is something that has been on my mind for many months now. And it comes from the ambition that we as entrepreneurs building in India today have, which is to build globally defining brands from India for the world. And that’s the root of this venture.
It also leverages India’s strength in manufacturing, especially in consumer electronics. So to cut a long story short, we’re building a new-age consumer appliances brand from India to the US, but the way we’re looking at appliances is with a completely fresh lens of saying, can we look at appliances that power our lives daily from a lens of hardware and software intersecting and really build a design-led intuitive, intelligent experience for the world.
Q: This is pretty audacious, because we don’t have globally relevant Indian brands, especially not from the manufacturing space in India. Why do you believe that you can take a shot at this and make it go?
Saggi: Two reasons; one is that we are today creatures of the world. I’ve had the privilege of studying and building and living in the US. That is my second home. I’m familiar with global markets. We launched, of course, with GoodGlamm as well under Serena’s joint venture, we launched a mainstream US beauty brand. The US, the world, I think the whole sort of journey of brand building is not alien to us.
Q: But it’s also one of the hardest markets to get into and compete in.
Saggi: I won’t debate that it’s not hard, but it’s a really interesting market because it’s a very product-led growth market. So if you find the right product that is needed for that consumer and, I’m a creature of brand and product. I’ve always been a very product-oriented person. But if you find the right product that is a latent need and is a gap in that space, the market is so big it has tailwinds of its own.
And the second piece to this, is that, interestingly enough, unlike India, the channels are very well established in the US. And the channels I talk about are online. So in particular the industry that I’m venturing into, 55% of small appliances are already sold online in the US, through Amazon, and your brand.com. And the channel that’s offline is also super well established, like your Walmart, your big box retailers like Costco, etc. So it’s actually not as disorganised as India is, interestingly, and that really is a very interesting part for us as founders to look at, analyse and understand where we have a right to win with our networks and with the products that we are bringing to market.
Q: Again, the similarities between what you’re attempting to do – you’re also now trying to build out a global business with BorderPlus?
Kumar: Last 10 years, I’ve been building upGrad, and that’s where we built a platform to train people in AI, machine learning, skilling, re-skilling, lifelong learning, etc. So a lot of what we were doing there was on the white collar space and people who are in the white collar ecosystem. One of the things that I wanted to do, and I was passionate about, was, how can I take my learning there into a slightly more bluish and gray-collar ecosystem? And I think in the process, I felt one of the biggest thing is India’s only natural resource that we have is our people. We don’t have coal, we don’t have oil, we don’t have mineral, sand. And how do we build on top of people? And therefore the thought was, we are the youngest population, our average age is about 30 years right now. Japan is at 50. Germany is at 47, US is at 40 right now. How do we take Indian talent, train them, provide them the finishing school, and deploy them internationally? Partly because in India, blue collar and gray collar, you can’t monetise enough because the starting salaries are ₹15,000-₹20,000 a month. But the moment they get deployed internationally, their salaries go to about ₹3-4 lakh a month. So that was the thought process. In the process, you solve the problem that the developed economies are facing in terms of skilled manpower, you solve for employment in India, and you solve for a better quality of life for those individuals, because now they can go and earn a much higher amount of money. On the macro front, it all looks good, but at micro level it is very poor.
Q: That’s exactly what I was going to come to because at the macro front, these are challenging, large, complex problems that require solutions, and they require solutions now. But you’re dealing with Visa issues, you’re dealing with immigration issues, even if there is a need and a desire you’re up against the lack of political will and political capital in many parts of the world at this point in time to be able to get that talent across. So what has that experience been like for you building a business to deal with all of the regulatory challenges?
Kumar: As entrepreneurs from India who are building for the world, you have to find that real play around policy arbitrage or cost arbitrage or people arbitrage. And I feel here, if you look at all the countries who have said, no, I don’t want these people in except technology and healthcare. So they always put that except bit where talent is needed. And I think the first area that we are starting with is healthcare, and taking Indian nurses and talent pool and deploying them internationally. And I think there’s a very strong mandate by the government in India to look for global.
I’ll give you one statistic, about 35 million Indians are living abroad. That number would make the Indian diaspora maybe the 20th or 30th largest country, and the Indian diaspora is sending about $125 billion worth of remittance back to India. Our total oil import bill is about $150 billion. So I think in some way, the government is going to push for it, and internationally, the ecosystem won’t have—you will see some right-wing, some left wing, and that sort of flow happening. But we have to provide the talent internationally, otherwise, there’s no other option that they have right now.
Watch the vide for more
