"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."
–Steve Jobs
Ambud Sharma, a passionate, fierce, and customer-driven fashion technopreneur, transitioned these motivation-steering words into reality with the launch of his brainchild brand, Escaro Royale, in the Indian luxury space.
From elegantly handcrafted shoes, exquisite premium bags, complementing belts to high street fashion accessories for men, Escaro boasts of a diverse and premium portfolio in luxury lifestyle and men's fashion today. to achieve the stature that Ambud savors in the present times, he had to put in his sweat and blood.
However, just like any other entrepreneur, he too experienced his share of challenges. But he chose to remain unfazed and rather took things in his stride. He focused on grasping the understanding of various elements of the luxury segment, consumer behavior, and market dynamics. He faced the hurdles and transformed them into an opportunity with meticulous planning, hard work, and dedication. Eventually, he was able to carve a niche for India's first super-premium luxury brand for Men. Undoubtedly, it was a roller coaster entrepreneurial ride but was indeed worth the pain as he is considered as one of the leading fashion technopreneurs who efficiently combines fashion with technology and is recognized for providing premium quality products to his customers.
Ambud has also incorporated the efficient use of e-commerce technologies & digital marketing for a pan-India penetration with a limited marketing budget to ensure the optimal working of his brand and provision of high-end products to its customers. The fabric of today's leading tech-driven luxury lifestyle brand, Escaro Royale, perfectly exhibits the latest technology and radiates Ambud's passion and curiosity of making it big in the luxury lifestyle segment.
Today, he continues to craft luxurious breakthrough fashion solutions and step up his game surpassing the traditional realms of business by leveraging algorithms and big data into his operations. Boasting the latest digital technology to discover, connect, converse and sell to its potential customers and possessing a carefully designed personalized experience approach, Ambud has successfully created a distinct position for the brand in the fashion industry that too in a price-sensitive country like India. He has been able to do this without hyper discounting his products. This is indeed a milestone that he rejoices and is proud of!
Escaro Royale enjoys an unrivaled stance in the market with its diverse variety of high-end quality products. This invariably leads to customer motivation which in turn is the biggest motivation for Ambud. He enthusiastically shares his ideology- "we do not aim for customer 'satisfaction', and rather, we work to garner 'customer delight'."
From the technological aspect, Escaro Royale has developed state-of-the-art LEGO ERP,in-house software that allows Ambud to keep a check on the working of the company at all stages right from material procurement, production, marketing, to after-sales services, and customer services.
Alongside, they have also leveraged Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies, to discover and answer the core data points to build a successful brand. They take immense pride in providing the products in a 3-day timeline which includes successful manufacturing to the shipping of an order. They extend the credit for this swift process to the integration of an extremely strong and advanced technological framework in their operations, customer service, and logistics.
Possessing vast experience and acquired skills in advanced technology and business administration along with a passion for the fashion industry, Ambud has created a unique symphony with Escaro Royale and is known for heading the operations of a tech-driven luxury lifestyle brand that focuses exclusively on men's fashion.
The brand through its custom-made high-end products resonates with opulence at various levels. Ambud travels an extra mile to provide a luxuriant customer experience at his experience center in Rama Road, New Delhi.
He spearheads the exclusive manufacturing of order-made products which serves as a unique differentiation for his brand and also allows the customers to experience custom-made luxury. This also helps the brand to avoid unnecessary sales pressure to liquidate inventory.
Unlike other brands in the industry which procure components from different parts of the world and assemble them to mark them as "Made in India", Ambud and his team at Escaro Royale don't tread on the same path.
They comply with the Make in India campaign and hence each product in their esteemed portfolio is made by skilled Indian artisans in factories. Meanwhile, they also focus on engaging the raw material suppliers in India. Additionally, the brand enforces an exclusively designed process wherein periodic checks are conducted in the factories.
They also follow the "Zero China Policy", a regulation rooted internally to the company, wherein, they do not use any products that are procured from or produced in China. They work with Indian manufactured products and imports from European and American companies that come with strong values of ethical standards of manufacturing. The brand understands that quality overpowers the economical aspect in the consumer's purchasing decisions and hence they give prime importance to the quality of their products.
"In my experience of mentoring entrepreneurs, I have discovered that most of them don't brainstorm on the marketing and monetizing aspect of their ideas. This is a core reason why, even funded companies, don't achieve profitability in the long run. For your hiring strategy, the first step when on-boarding VPs is to hire a marketing VP first followed by the sales VP. I extend this suggestion because having studied the market for long, I have realized that sales are the byproduct of marketing and not the other way around," Ambud advises the next generation entrepreneurs.
He continued "Always remember, there's only one person who can fire the best CEOs in the world, and it is the customer. The customer is always the boss who can choose to shift their purchase choice if they do not receive the expected value. Lastly, understand the value chain- value should be in balance or higher than the money they are paying. Also, focus on building a team that can play to strengths of the value of the business and chooses to be a customer-centric business over a profit-centric one."
Following a people-centric leadership approach and optimally utilizing his problem-solving and interpersonal skills, Ambud makes concerted efforts to achieve the long-term vision of capturing the audience across tier 1 to tier 2 to tier 3 cities along with pan India location-centric luxury hubs.
While he savors his passion for writing software, cooking, keeping himself abreast with the recent happenings across the globe, and indulging in informative discussions, the leader follows an ever-optimistic 'Never quit' mindset and aims to work hard to make his customers a part of Escaro's brandstory.
Ambud Sharma is a Drexel University & Penn State University alumnus in engineering and business administration. He is also a Master's thesis writer on Amazon LLC as a joint research thesis with the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State University. Meanwhile, he also possesses several world-renowned certifications in process and people management.
He boasts of the titles of Founder & CEO of Ligo Group, a New Delhi-based group of companies specializing in e-commerce, brand management, enterprise software, manufacturing & business consulting domains. Ambud's corporate group also owns and operates the extreme-luxury lifestyle brand, Escaro Royale.
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