Business Beyond Borders
Enabling Business Expansion
With globalization progressively taking root across the planet, the need for connecting with the right people has become paramount. For a lot of companies endeavouring to spread their wings across borders, enablers like Business Beyond Borders become an important factor for survival. Business Beyond Borders helps cross border sellers in facilitating their growth, establishing their branches, and expanding their market reach. They not only provide practical solutions across different markets; they also anticipate and cater to any issues that a startup or an SME might face while offshoring. An emerging enterprise itself, Business Beyond Borders has already started to make a difference in the markets across South East Asia and the Middle East.
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Business Beyond Borders is an eCommerce enabler with an aim to create an eCommerce ecosystem, that helps the brands and sellers across the globe with an end to end solution starting from product market viability to warehousing and local sales expertise. An initiative that helps businesses, in particular, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), to operate internationally, BBB supports the development of the companies’ activities in target markets with the ultimate goal of increasing economic growth.BBB kick-started in June 2020 and is today already helping brands scale-up in Malaysia in SouthEast Asia and Dubai in the Middle East as their first phase of launch. BBB aims to fix three problems that cross border sellers face in scaling their eCommerce presence in new geography:
- Assortment planning: BBB helps in identifying the potential SKU for that particular market.
- Local Warehouse and Local Entity: With BBB’s local business/warehouse partners, clients enjoy all the perks of becoming a local seller through their local entity.
- Local expertise: BBB’s local knowledge helps the brand with customer support in the local language which helps with a faster conversion rate.
The prime motivation for Bhavana Prakash Menon, the founder, and CEO of Business Beyond Borders has been the 9+ years of experience in the eCom corporate sector, and the steep learning curve on the nuances of eCommerce. The idea was first spoken with her business partner during her tenure in Lazada Malaysia when she saw an over-dependence on Chinese sellers and realized that Indian sellers would be able to match up the price with probably equal or better quality. She is also driven by a personal goal to create an impact through her expertise which is helping home-grown brands and SMEs expand their brand to new geographies seamlessly.
BBB feels this is the right time as Cross-border commerce is expected to hit $26 billion by 2020 in the Middle East predicted to exceed USD 150 billion by 2025 in South East Asia. BBB identified that the homegrown brands/sellers/manufacturers would have reached their potential in the domestic eCom market through Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra and would become the ideal choice in the Middle East & South East Asia as well. As the only way the existing brands have gone global is via Amazon, it is also important for these brands to have a business model through which they could tap into other top eCommerce portals of that geography like Lazada & Shopee in South East Asia and Noon, Namshi & Carrefour in the Middle East.
Business Beyond Borders also provides consulting services for those brands who have only been acquiring customers through Instagram / Facebook in India to become a potential seller in the top eCom spaces within India like Amazon and Flipkart. BBB comes with a decade of experience in the eCom industry which helps each of its clients to understand eCom business in depth. BBB is a part of their expansion journey starting from Ideation to Conceptualization.
BBB’s business model provides an end to end solution that also includes providing trailer made business model to sellers so that each brand gets exactly that part of the service that they would be struggling with while catering to cross border customers.
BBB will soon be an app that the brands need to download to understand the costs involved and to sign up with preliminary details so that BBB can ensure that the model created for the seller is viable. The app also aims to give a snapshot of how each geography’s eCom platforms are performing including order and revenue details. The inception of the company took place in June 2020 with the first two stores live in July. Today, BBB has already shipped out over 100 orders and the brands onboarded are already making a 5 figure monthly revenue through them. In August, BBB was signed as the official commercial partner for Titan Malaysia.
In September, BBB partnered with Ping Pong Services, a USbased company which is one of the fastest-growing cross border payment platforms to ensure that Indian brands grow their cross border business seamlessly. BBB has today an extensive array of brands wanting to join to tap into the eCom space beyond India.
ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY
The founder of Business Beyond Borders, Bhavana Prakash Menon, has an experience of almost a decade in the eCom industry across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. She worked with most of the major players in the eCom space including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Jabong, and Lazada Malaysia, a venture of Alibaba Group, until October 2019. It was when she had just started her new life as a General Manager for Fave MY, which is a digital wallet, that she was diagnosed with Clinically Isolated Syndrome.
At this point, however, she realized that this was not the time to be planning a complete break from work but to focus on making the dream of becoming a CEO of her own company before 30 come true. Despite the situation, Bhavana took up entrepreneurship as her next venture and built Business Beyond Borders from the ground up, to realize her dream of starting her own company before the age of thirty. Today the CEO of her own company that is hoping to create an impact on SMEs and brands, Bhavana is close to achieving more than what she’d dreamt of. Sharing her insight that helped when a brand goes live under Business Beyond Borders, Bhavana says that allocating GMV and Volume driving SKUs for the brand helps join specific campaigns with a strategic view to drive conversion in the first month itself. This helps the brand categorize its catalogue and help us create a success story immediately.
FUTURE ENDEAVORS
By the end of the next year, Business Beyond Borders hopes to open up warehouses in multiple countries across SEA and the Middle East including other parts of South East Asia & The Middle East so that the ecosystem can be ever-growing. Business Beyond Borders aims to help those sellers and brands, who find existing fulfilment policies in eCom space not so friendly, to see BBB as an alternative solution to scale up to multiple geographies. Cross border is a 1Trillion$ Industry and BBB is already a part of this growing segment in eCom space.
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PARTING WORDS FROM BHAVANA PRAKASH MENON:
Take the leap of faith, today. The idea you have is getting discussed in another place by another person. It is okay if you didn’t get it right the first time. Remember JK rowling got rejected 12 times before Harry Porter got Published.
