When Business Begins at Home

Once considered a long shot, Naaptol, the home-shopping company, has managed to scale rapidly by understanding its customers better.

- Angad Singh Thakur

A television presenter puts a mobile phone in a glass jar along with screws, forks and other metallic implements. He then shakes the jar vigorously while breathlessly describing the product’s features. This visual, and several others like it, are beamed into millions of households across the country daily. A phone number is flashed at the bottom of the screen along with the logo of the home-shopping company, Naaptol.

As we make our way up Naaptol’s office in Rabale, Navi Mumbai, multiple studios located on the first floor are creating hours of such content that is being aired on the network’s own channels and across other TV media pan-India. It’s a wet afternoon in July and Manu Agarwal, 46, founder and CEO of Naaptol, is seated three floors above this veritable content factory. “There are six studios on the first floor and we now have the capability to do about 14 half-an-hour-long shows a day,” Agarwal tells Forbes India. “And half of this content is live.” He adds that the company attends 130,000 calls a day through its dedicated third- party call centres with a workforce of nearly 2,300 people. The result: “We do business [sell products] worth about Rs 8 crore every day,” says Agarwal.