Back‘Online the best thing to happen to our industry’
The trend of nutrition and holistic wellness accelerated in India and across the world. This trend is about eating well, regular exercise, sleeping well, meditation, and mindfulness
PremiumNew Delhi: American direct selling company Amway’s global chief executive officer (CEO) Milind Pant worked with Yum! Brands and Unilever before joining the Michigan-based firm, known for nutrition products and beauty brands, in January 2019. Pant, who is now in India, announced global investments of more than $300 million through 2024 to boost innovation and science, digital technology, and entrepreneurship. Of this, $20 million will be invested in India, which is among its priority markets, along with the US and China, he said in an interview. Edited excerpts:
How has the transition been from a fast-moving consumer goods company and quick service restaurant business to direct selling dietary supplements?
There are many firsts in this. It was a shift of industries. It was shift to a family-owned, privately-held company, and it was the first outside of family and external CEO for Amway. What I do in any new role is to take the first 100 days to listen and learn. That’s exactly what I did in early 2019—go to markets across the world to understand how our entrepreneurs and our leaders are building their business. I went to startup companies and large companies in both technology and nutrition space. I went to see Alibaba and met Google and Facebook in California. I went to nutrition startups in Seattle, and Los Angeles to understand where the buck is going. Then we put together a 10-year strategic plan. The core of that plan is to empower and unleash our entrepreneurs to grow their health and wellness communities. That’s a change we are investing in. India is pioneering that change today.
The pandemic boosted nutrition businesses in general in India. How was the response in other markets?
The trend of nutrition and holistic wellness accelerated in India and across the world. This trend is about eating well, regular exercise, sleeping well, meditation, and mindfulness. These things were there in pieces, but everyone became highly aware of it for their own health, those of their spouses, parents, and children. That provided a fillip to our business, because our business is a wellness solution.
However, there’s another thing that’s happened at the same time—there was an underlying trend of increase in micro entrepreneurship of people, of women wanting the flexibility and earning supplemental income. Again, the pandemic disruption provided a boost to that. So both these—the rise of micro entrepreneurship and the immunity, nutrition, wellness space—were tailwinds for Amway, the entrepreneur-led health and wellness company. Despite all the challenges and all the tough things that everyone has gone through, our business has grown in 2021. We are confident that we are in a multi-year growth phase, because we are providing a societal need and playing a small part in providing this health and wellness solution.
Hasn’t the Amway business model, which relies on direct selling, suffered on account of consumers shopping online because of covid?
If you look at the last decade, there are two industries that have grown exponentially. One is e-commerce—Amazon and Flipkart are examples. We find examples across the world and in every market.
The other is social platforms. Facebook is an example, but we can go to Kakao in Korea, WeChat in China, Line in other parts of Asia, and there are examples in Latin America and Russia. Today, we are seeing an interesting trend, where social platforms and e-commerce are coming together with people who are online, building the community. They do this sometimes in person, but primarily online. That links back to commerce. We are empowering micro entrepreneurs to build their communities online. Then we are integrating the backend commerce, on payments, transactions, product delivery, so that’s entrepreneurship in a box and hassle free for them. We see online as one of the best things that happened to our industry. We are investing significant amounts in training for the entrepreneurs to move to this to this new era.
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