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‘Senior citizens have become tech savvy, willing to spend money on themselves’: Ayush Agrawal – The Indian Express


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Ayush Agrawal

In 2016, when Ayush Agrawal was looking at market trends in the country, one fact that stood out was that the senior citizen population was evolving and growing. “India is a young country but people forget that India is also rapidly ageing. While the rest of the population is growing at two per cent annually, the senior citizen population is growing at four per cent every year. This Census is expected to show the senior citizen population at 150 crore. At the same time, if you look at pension data, you see that it is growing at 14 per cent to 15 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate),” he says. Given a market that was growing in size in terms of population as well as spending capacity, there was only one thing to do. Agrawal and co-founder Tapan Mishra began a start-up called Seniority, an e-commerce platform for the needs of senior citizens. Seniority also has four offline stores now, in Pune, Coimbatore, Bhiwandi and Chennai, but 95 per cent of their orders come in online. Agrawal decodes the business of selling to seniors in an interview with The Indian Express. Excerpts:

How has the senior citizen psychology changed over the years, so much so that they have become an industry?

This demographic has become savvy. They are willing to spend money on themselves. As recently as 10 to 15 years ago, if you had asked a 65 to 70-year-old as to what they wanted to do with their money, they would say it was their children’s inheritance. Now, seniors are more interested in spending on themselves. We weren’t the first to see this. A lot of businesses were changing their offerings in order to cater to seniors, such as travel agencies with dedicated travel verticals for seniors; banks with senior citizen accounts; real estate companies with senior citizen communities that moved away from the typical idea of old-age homes. These premium senior citizen communities were being charged almost 30 per cent higher than prevailing real estate rates.

How was your start-up born?

We saw that there was no one aggregating the products available in and outside the country and making it available to the audience willing to buy them. This is not only senior citizens but also their children, who wanted to buy relevant products but didn’t know where to go. They had no knowledge of the kind of products that they could buy and this was the gap that we wanted to plug. I had graduated from IIM Lucknow in 2013 and joined RPG Group as part of the general management cadre. I played various marketing and strategy roles across various group companies. When the group launched RPG Ventures and invited business ideas, we applied and got through. Back then, from RPG, there was just me. Tapan Mishra, who graduated from London School of Economics and XIMB (Xavier’s Institute of Management), came in when we set up our go-to market strategy. We realised we needed a strong person from an operations perspective. He was heading operations at that time for another e-commerce start-up. We got him on board as a co-founder.

Has Seniority been affected in any way by your personal experiences?

Both Tapan and I had lived away from our parents for quite a while due to our education and work. Even if your parents are active and living by themselves, it is still a concern at the back of your mind. When we were creating our business thesis, these things were clearly in our minds. We could resonate with the problem we were trying to solve.

How did the plan find initial and continuing financial investment and support?

RPG has been involved from the first day and is as good as a third co-founder. Seniority is a part of RPG Group and was incubated as part of RPG Ventures ecosystem. At the beginning, the group had put in a million dollars. Since then, the group has allotted for the rapid growth of the company. Last month, we did almost 1,500 orders a day at an average order rate of Rs 800, so the revenue comes to Rs 3.5 crore (approximately) in a month.

You are considered pioneers in this line. How difficult was it to convince people about an e-commerce platform exclusively for senior citizens?

When we first started vendor conversation, it was mid-2016. At the beginning, when the company was still in Mumbai and we hadn’t yet shifted to Pune, we had to speak to distributors and convince them that this idea has merit. Back then, we didn’t even have a website and had to find a tech vendor to set up one. But the effort of going to the market really paid off because the partners we got on board back then have continued to be our key suppliers to date. We have grown and, in turn, they have grown with us. When you are the first mover and are setting up a market, the challenge is not so much acceptance as it is knowledge. Once people know about it, acceptance is high. Once you see the portfolio, you realise how it solves problems and you might want to purchase some products but till then, you wouldn’t even know that this is something you could look for. In the initial stages, it was us going to vendors and getting products on board. Now we have a team of almost a dozen people whose only job is finding innovative products not just in India but across the world. This means that every week and month, we are adding hundreds of products on the website. This also means that whenever we look at our list of bestsellers, it will be a different set of 10 products. Our current bestseller is an easy-to-install bathroom cabinet mirror. Couple of months ago, the bestseller was a squatty stool that makes motions easier and is excellent for seniors as Indian-style commodes are hard on the knees but Western-style commodes aren’t as healthy. The squatty stool marries the two. The nail cutter with magnifying glass is doing quite well. The handy heater was a bestseller during the winter months.

Your start-up is an e-commerce portal that depends on senior citizens being tech savvy. How have you designed the platform to empower them?

Seniors are increasingly becoming tech savvy. They may or may not be e-commerce savvy yet but most have smartphones. They would be comfortable on Facebook and WhatsApp. We have made products available on one website in an easy-to-consume manner. You can call us, send us a message on WhatsApp, ask us questions on social media. We are there across all platforms to answer queries, explain products and take orders. This channel drives almost 10 per cent to 15 per cent of our revenues. People take calls instead of an IVR (interactive voice response). On WhatsApp, people answer to your texts and not bots. So, our clients are two-third, youngsters buying products for their parents, and a third are seniors buying products for themselves.

What prompted you to start your own label in February 2019?

There were five or six products, initially, and, as of now, we have 15 to 16 products listed under our private label, Seniority. You may go on a e-commerce portal and see 15 different variants of a product and don’t know which is a good one. For us, to be able to solve that concern, to get the best quality product from wherever they are manufactured – the UK or the US, China, Japan or Korea, among others – needed strong curation. We realised that we were good as an aggregator but the market wanted more. The next step is to launch our own designs, which would be new products that don’t exist elsewhere.

How do senior citizens buy, in terms of healthcare and lifestyle products?

We have realised that, overall, the percentage of our sales is 85 per cent leisure and lifestyle and 15 per cent medical. One of the first bestsellers we had on the platform was Sa Re Ga Ma Carvaan. We realised that it is not about medical needs or assistance. This is true for people in their fifties and sixties, who are still active, and don’t see themselves as being dependent and don’t even want to be considered senior citizens. That is a big audience. They feel that products for medical needs will come 20 years later and, right now, they are making the best of their lives. Pets also are popular among senior citizens and we have products that can make it easier for them to not have to clean their car. The car backseat cover is to ensure that you don’t have to clean your car but if you do need to clean your car, we have a portable hand-held vacuum cleaner. Across the board, we have identified opportunities to make seniors’ lives easier on a daily basis. Gardening is a big hobby and we have a wide range for them to choose from.

Safety is a big concern for seniors. Have you considered this in your selection of products?

For safety, there are products at various touch points, either within the home or outside, depending on medical issues. For dementia and Alzheimer’s, for instance, we have products including safety trackers. If a patient tends to roam outside the house, you have this virtual geo-fencing and get an alert if the person crosses the geo-fence. Within the home, if a person is bedridden and does not have a full-time attendant, there is an alarm that can hang by the side of the bed. You pull down the thread and it starts beeping loudly to alert people in the house. We have easy-to-install cameras that let you monitor the house. Among other products is an easy-to-use grenade-shaped device that you pull out and it starts screaming to warn people that you are in trouble.

Tell us about your efforts to build a community for senior citizens.

For us, one of the key features in how we are building the business is to ensure that our customers do not see us as just a shop. Our engagement has to be at a deeper level than a transactional relationship of buying and selling. This audience has grown up in an era when there were no commercial relationships. They were friends even with their local shopkeeper. They crave the personal touch. In the four stores we have across the country as well as non-store locations, we are trying to develop offline touch points with our audience. We have engaging community activities such as yoga, meditation, karaoke, zumba, and so on regularly. This has created a loyal community base. These members also gather to celebrate special occasions and festivals such as Diwali, Christmas, Holi, Grandparents’ Day, Mother’s Day. Last year, we conducted a yoga session at Joggers’ Park in Kalyani Nagar and, purely through word of mouth, more than 400 people turned up. Clearly, there is power in the community.



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