$450M, 6 Brands & 4 Countries: Why Sunil Agrawal Refuses to Stop

**Matt Bertulli** (0:00)
So Sunil, just introduce yourself. Tell us about the business. Where are we right now?

**Sunil Agrawal** (0:04)
So we are at ShopLC. Started this company 19 years ago.
Part of VGL Group, which I started 46 years ago.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:13)
Your company is older than me.

**Katy Mimari** (0:15)
It's my same age. It's embarrassing.

**Sunil Agrawal** (0:18)
I'm the same age, guys.

**Katy Mimari** (0:19)
It's incredible.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:20)
The entire group of companies, you're publicly traded, so you can say, what is the total size of the business today?

**Sunil Agrawal** (0:27)
Yeah. Last year, we did $416 million revenue.
But I look at the business not in terms of dollars, as much as pieces sold, meals delivered. We have 57,000 meals per school day. My hope and aim is to take it to a million meals per school day by 2040 That would mean that we need to grow 20 percent or so something every year.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:51)
At $450 million, 20 percent is like $90 million that you have to add to the business. So you're publicly traded too.

**Sunil Agrawal** (0:58)
Yeah.

**Matt Bertulli** (0:59)
That is very rare in consumer. We've long talked about this on the show, that consumer companies typically don't go public. How long have you guys been public? Where are you public?

**Sunil Agrawal** (1:10)
Yeah. We went public in India 30 years ago.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:13)
What does it mean to be public then? So neither one of us, we run private companies. Can you just unpack that for me?

**Sunil Agrawal** (1:19)
So a lot of compliance, a lot of shareholder outreach, investor meetings, quarterly results, quarterly investor meetings. So a lot of compliance and engagement with investor community.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:33)
Okay.

**Sunil Agrawal** (1:33)
But in retrospect, we went public when we did.
When I look back, I probably may have delayed the going public. But it was good for us because it gave us an additional currency for awarding our good employees, for retaining them. As a currency, if you want to acquire our company, it's an additional currency.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:57)
Got it.

**Sunil Agrawal** (1:58)
There's a lot of benefits to it.

**Matt Bertulli** (1:59)
How many employees today?

**Sunil Agrawal** (2:02)
ShopLC has about 325, group-wide about 3,500.

**Matt Bertulli** (2:07)
Okay.
What is the rest of the group? So ShopLC would be the online shopping, TV shopping. What's the rest of the group do?

**Sunil Agrawal** (2:18)
Yeah.
We are a vertical company. So ShopLC is the front retail company. We have a supply chain that we own ourselves from Jamsun Manufacturing, Jewelry Design, Jewelry Manufacturing, Logistics, all retail units. We also have similar business in UK and Germany. So we have total six brands within the group. They are retail brands and supply chain in India, China, Thailand, and Bali.

**Matt Bertulli** (2:48)
It's incredible. You basically do everything but mine the gold and the stones.

**Sunil Agrawal** (2:53)
Yes. And that's something that I don't want to go in.

**Matt Bertulli** (2:56)
Now, you just stopped at digging a hole. That was like, we're going to go as vertical as we can, just like, but right there.

**Katy Mimari** (3:02)
Somebody else digs it. He wants the pretty things out of it.

**Sunil Agrawal** (3:05)
Enough to do here.

**Matt Bertulli** (3:06)
So let's go right back to the beginning then. What was the first version of this business? Because as I understand it, there's been like lots of iterations as we go.

**Sunil Agrawal** (3:15)
Yeah. I started 46 years ago as a lapidary, gemstone lapidary.
We made those gemstones, supplied those gemstones to people who are making jewelry, and then supplying that jewelry largely to TV shopping companies.

**Matt Bertulli** (3:31)
Okay.

**Katy Mimari** (3:32)
Which is your biggest competitor.

**Sunil Agrawal** (3:34)
Yeah. Slowly over the years, we went from gemstone to jewelry manufacturing, to brick and mortar retail, and then to TV retail.

**Matt Bertulli** (3:47)
Do you still have brick and mortar retail?

**Sunil Agrawal** (3:49)
No. No. So we set that up in 2005
We built it up to 19 high-end stores in Caribbean and Alaska. When global financial crisis hit, nobody was going on cruise ships, nobody wanted to buy jewelry, so we sold the chain off, 10 euro per dollar.

**Matt Bertulli** (4:09)
When did the home shopping, like this digital, we're going to walk around, you're going to show us this, but when did this version start? It was right after that?

**Sunil Agrawal** (4:20)
We launched in 2006 in the UK, then 2007 in Germany and US.

**Matt Bertulli** (4:30)
Can you talk to me about, so you were selling to the existing TV people, and then was it their model that inspired you to do this? What did you see from them that you were like, I want to do that?