The company strengthens its leadership with two senior appointments in their new office
May 23, 2019
Headquartered in Mumbai with an office in New York, Hopscotch is India’s fastest growing kids fashion brand and a one-stop destination for all kid’s fashion needs. Since inception in 2012, the brand has entered upto 1,300 cities all across the country and serves over 2.2 million customers.
South India is one of the company’s biggest markets, and Bengaluru is amongst the top 3 cities that contributes to the company’s overall share of business. Hopscotch recently opened an office in the city to power its next phase of growth. Hopscotch has added two senior members to their management team – Somu Vadali, Chief Product Officer, and Vivek Pawar, Senior Director of Programs and Growth.
The combination of strong leadership and a Bangalore location will enable the company to accelerate investments in data, product, and engineering, and further it’s vision as the country’s first true fashion tech brand.
Somu Vadali joins Hopscotch as the lead of data and product functions team, is a digital and data transformation leader. He spent 18 of 22 years career in Silicon Valley building digital and data products across consumer, retail, and fin tech industries at Yodlee, Acxiom, Imprivata, and Nuance before relocating to Future Group in India. He is a product leader with a balance of strategic thought and pragmatism, and is a unique results-driven product thinker. His experience spans leading global and complex initiatives with domain expertise including mobile, gamification, behavioural change, machine learning, biometric data, speech recognition, predictive Analytics & SaaS. Somu is an adept thinker known to exude high levels of energy and adds a strong engineering led ethos to the leadership at Hopscotch.
On his appointment Somu Vadali said, “Hopscotch has achieved unparalleled product-market fit and established itself as the #1 kids fashion brand in India. The market is huge and expected to cross USD 12 billion. We are leveraging data science and cross border commerce to non-linearly grow the business and turn hugely profitable. I’m excited to be leading the product and data portfolios to enhance the HDIP (Hopscotch data intelligence platform) by bringing some of my learnings in the consumer internet growth from Silicon Valley.”
Vivek Pawar joins Hopscotch as the Senior Director of programs and growth. He spent a few decades in the technology domain building products in the fashion e-commerce space. Vivek founded ‘StyleTag’ where he successful raised several rounds of capital with a vision to disrupt the fashion space. Prior to this, he worked closely and advised leading multinational organizations including Nordstrom and The GAP, building O2O points of sale and merchandising platforms for in the United States.
With both these appointments and their new base in Bengaluru, Hopscotch aims to accelerate the pace of hiring in Bengaluru by extending offers to data, product, and engineering talent.
Rahul Anand, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Hopscotch India says, “We’re excited about being in the heart of one of the world’s most vibrant tech hubs and induct top caliber engineers in the coming months. We are building the countries #1 brand for kids focused on delighting selection starved parents across small towns in India. We have taken a highly disruptive approach enabled by data science, product, and engineering to offer unparalleled value to the customer. Strong leadership will play a vital role in attracting strong talent to join Hopscotch in our journey, make the right product investments, and catalyze growth. With a new team on board, we will accelerate our pace of investments.”
