Rahul Narvekar

Rahul Narvekar (born October 1, 1972, Mumbai, India) is an Indian ecommerce entrepreneur, a start ups pro and currently the Founder CEO of Indianroots — an NDTV Ethnic Retail Venture.^[1]

Education

Rahul Narvekar earned his bachelor's degree from Mumbai University, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Rahul attended Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India to study Global Management/Strategy, class of 2006. Rahul went to Essec Business School, Cergy-Pontoise, Ile-De-France, France in 2010 and learnt Luxury Brand Management.

Early life

Rahul, at an initial stage of his life started working as a door to door salesman to pay for his education. He worked for various sales campaigns from selling the new launched Dettol plaster to small paan wallahs in Mumbai’s red light district to peddling Gillette razors in Akbarallys. While studying business entrepreneurship full-time he moved to TSN - teleshopping network run by UTV. He learnt cable advertising and set up a cable advertising company to sell corporate advertising on local cable which was then his venture.

Post that Rahul became a part of Asia's first Interactive music channel named Oxygen in 1999 in Mumbai. The company scaled to revenues of INR 2crore a year with clients including Coca Cola, Colgate, HLL and more. In the span of two years he went from travelling in local trains to Honda City and got back to local trains again as Cable industry is controlled completely by mafia and they were forced to sell out for — he learnt the first big lesson of entrepreneurship then. After this Rahul met his wife, RJ C. Pallavi Rao online and came to Delhi to start again from scratch.

Career

Real Estate:

Rahul Narvekar started as a Senior Manager of District Center, Janakpuri with ANSAL API in January 2001 and headed Non Traditional Revenue at North India’s First mall in Khelgaon, Delhi, India. After a stint of 3 years and 9 months, Rahul worked with Gold Souk Gurgaon as Vice President Marketing. He later joined Suncity Projects as Head Retail in 2007 and went on to be the General Manager at DLF Retail Developers Ltd in 2008 where he headed the Mall of India project aimed at introducing ultra-large format malls in the Indian subcontinent.^[2]

eCommerce:

In October 2009, Rahul Narvekar co-founded FashionandYou to create a coveted fashion and luxury brands ecommerce store with a European Entrepreneur – Oliver Jung ^[3] Having scaled the venture from 7 people to almost 1200 and raising 48 million dollars, and then joined hands with Anant Nahata of HFCL to revive an investment made by Anant called theprivatesales.com. Rahul got his core team back but within a few months Anant’s company Infotel won the 4G network license for India and was bought by Reliance. At this time Rahul came in touch with NDTV team which was looking at entering e-commerce industry. Since January 2013, Rahul Narvekar is working as the founder CEO of Indianroots, an NDTV ethnic retail venture.^[4] He is a Charter Member of TiE ^[5] Delhi NCR empowering Indian Entrepreneurs and actively participates in Entrepreneurship summits across India.^[6][7][8] An alumnus of IIMC and IIMA, he also takes some classes at IIMA and GRD Institute of management, Coimbatore. Rahul Narvekar is also the Founder of the Vadapao Club - to engage Mumbaikars not residing in Bombay.

Personal life

Rahul/Narvekar is married to RJ C. Pallavi Rao The couple met online in the year 2000 and Rahul shifted base to Delhi from Mumbai for love. Pallavi is a famous RJ with India’s leading Radio Station – Radio Mirchi.^[9]

References

1. ↑ "NDTV ecommerce Indianroots CEO". NDTV India. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. 
2. ↑ "DLF Retail". Asia Retail Congress. 
3. ↑ "FashionandYou". therodinhoods. 
4. ↑ "Rahul Narvekar Joins NDTV eCommerce". Medianama. 
5. ↑ "TIE India". TIE Delhi. 
6. ↑ "Entrepreneurship Summit". TEDEX GRD. 
7. ↑ "IIMA Conclave". IIMA. 
8. ↑ "IAMAI Summit". IAMAI. 
9. ↑ "C. Pallavi Rao". Exchange4Media.