Eisha Srivastava
“I want to build a company whose legacy transcends and outlasts its founders.”
Company: Plodo
Founded in: 2022
Eisha Srivastava has had the desire to create something big – a brand or a service that people love and use frequently – for as long as she can remember. From the time she was in college, she maintained a list of startup ideas. However, a planned short corporate stint turned into a decade-long career spanning jobs at Nestle, Capital One, and Amazon in the US. At the end of 2021, Eisha decided to pull the plug. She moved back to India and took the plunge to start her own business.
While at Amazon, she fell in love with supply chain and decided that her startup will solve problems in that domain. As she explored what to build through interviews with potential customers, a glaring gap kept resurfacing in multiple discussions: new-age digital brands don’t have the means to expand into offline markets. Coupled with her learnings from sales and distribution stints at Nestle, Eisha decided to launch Plodo, a platform that helps digital-first consumer brands launch offline operations in India.
Offline retail continues to be critical for brands to grow as it caters to over 90% of Indians. Bengaluru-based Plodo’s research also showed that regular ecommerce users like to occasionally shop offline to discover new products. It reaffirmed Eisha and team’s belief that offline retail is here to stay. And for new-age brands to truly become household names, going offline is critical.
The existing distribution channels were built by FMCG giants, who can afford large sales and distribution teams across cities with hundreds of feet on the street to maintain personal relationships with retailers. For young consumer brands, creating a similar channel is financially unviable and not necessarily their forte.
Plodo is changing this by creating a distribution platform that independent brands can plug into and get instant access to offline retail channels. Plodo’s mission is to empower emerging independent brands to have access to the markets that have so far been dominated by large incumbent CPG companies. On the other side, Plodo enables retailers to test innovative products that their customers desire with minimal risk.
Eisha has a Bachelor’s in Technology from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Calcutta.