Modern Retail spoke to Barada Sahu, Founder & CEO of retail tech startup mason:
What is the origin story at mason? How did you become interested in creating this business model?
Working at Flipkart – Walmart’s Asia arm – both the founders, Barada & Kausambi had an aha moment! They had been building engines within marketplaces for shopping for over a billion+ consumers. They realized that the secret sauce for growth was actually in this custom-forged shopping engine.
While entrepreneurs can today launch their stores fast with Shopify, Instagram, or Amazon, making it into a profitable business is a whole different challenge.
Omnichannel listings, Cross-Border selling, mixed-model Attribution, Segmentation, Experimentation… all this suddenly takes you away from the fundamentals of business – understanding what matters to consumers and making great products.
Commerce today is a whole lot more complex. mason emerged from this insight. We need to simplify commerce.
You need an army of tech operators or a bunch of middlemen to be able to run a profitable business as an entrepreneur. You have to spend 18 hours a week grinding to understand what really works in your store or how these apps all tie in together. You get tired and end up selling out your dreams to aggregators (the so-called soulless operators).
At mason, the mantra has been simple. Retail & commerce is – has always been – all about the customer. The technology for commerce should also be centred around the customer.
mason’s AI shopping engine brings this customer-first ethos to make commerce simple for entrepreneurs and brands – helping entrepreneurs not just launch stores, but build profitable businesses.
Kaus loves to craft consumer-first commerce, Barry loves making AI & technology that works for everyone. This trinity of user + technology + commerce collided together. The business model is simple -mason wins when entrepreneurs win. It’s not a zero-sum game.
mason’s AI shopping engine aims to bring the joy of shopping back online by powering brands with autonomous shopping agents that help shoppers discover, zoom in on, and buy their fav products from their fav brands – anywhere. anytime – and hence eliminating the middleman
What kind of challenges are you solving? What is the traditional approach and how are you improving on that?
The Amazon tax on retail is crippling for entrepreneurs. From listings to fulfilment to referrals to Amazon advertising, and growing CAC – brands are now on razor-thin margins. In fact, CAC has risen by more than 60% across all categories while Amazon taxes are increasing every year – marketplaces like Walmart, etc. pocket 30-50% of a brand’s online sales. There’s little left to do for product innovation.
Simply put, we are helping brands take back their freedom to sell. We are eliminating the middleman.
An interesting thing to note here is that 98 / 100 people do not buy in your store. Modern commerce is not about launching your store. It’s about running your business. This is the secret that marketplaces try to hide away, selling to customers is all about how you run your store every day.
Traditionally, only marketplaces or big retail has had the technology muscle to bring and orchestrate this complex infrastructure – the rest of the industry is left stitching together fragmented point solutions (an average of 25+ apps in your Shopify store) that simply put do not work well with each other. From speed checkout to conversions to engagement to lead capture to store builders.
mason’s all-in-one AI Shopping Engine powers shopping from day#0.
How many customers do you have now? How do you describe your typical users? Who are your target customers?
mason today powers 1000+ customers and 8,000 brands worldwide.
Brands all over the world struggle with their store conversions and growth, the sweet spot today is teams who know their products work – and now want to sell these products better.
Some of the major categories where we play a big role are where commerce today is most about users and consumers – Fashion & Apparel, Beauty & Grooming, Health & Fitness, Home & Furnishing, and Petcare are the fastest growing segments.
Founders, growth heads & eCommerce leaders use mason today to run their online shopping on autopilot.
Can you give me some use cases of how people have benefited from Mason?
In just 2.5 years since its launch, mason has helped hundreds of global brands make their stores as efficient in sales as Amazon. A typical store
- Improves AOV by 23% in 30 days
- Improves session time by 17%
- Improves sell-through by 35% in just 60 days
Case Studies:
- Sports & Fitness Exchange is the go-to brand for over 50,000+ fitness enthusiasts across the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dHgcECsDhw
- For This High-Protein Food Brand, ModeMagic Is Their Brand Enabler A fast-growing food supplements brand, Protein Chef is powered by mason’s personalized quizzes that both educate and reward visitors in exchange for opt-in data. The result? More than 80% of visitors are engaged with the interactive quiz, leading to increased awareness and motivation to buy, through rewards and discounts.
More Stories:
Rohan used to be a 1-man e-commerce-growth team at Bare Anatomy. Mason powered him to launch 20 growth experiments in 1 quarter, helping him increase conversion rate by 200%. Another example is Carey who leads eCommerce at Public Desire. She was looking for a one-stop solution to launch exciting sales, promos & new products across Public Desire’s online stores in UK, EU, US. Mason’s no-code abilities coupled with daily performance insights powered her team to have an impact on their sales & growth every day.
Daniel and his team at Cube Partnership who power marquee brands such as AstonMartin F1 and CWG2022 started their partnership with mason with one brand.. and today grow multiple portfolio clients under their umbrella using mason.
Further Case Studies
BFCM in March? How Walls By Me Achieved Record Sales with ModeMagic
How ModeMagic Supercharged Battery Mate to $7,000+ in Additional Revenue
Bathla Drives Triple Digit Conversion Lifts With Mason
What stage of revenue are you in? How do you monetise?
Over $1bn in GMV flows through mason’s shopping engine today and the company is set to reach $5 billion GMV by 2023 & $100 billion GMV within three years. The business model is simple – we win with entrepreneurs. Merchants only pay a success fee for every sale that mason powers.
Which companies do you consider your closest competitors? How do you differentiate?
From composable commerce, to headless stacks, to automation middleware there’s a lot of noise in the hyper-fragmented commerce ecosystem today. To top it all Amazon and marketplaces connect the dots and continue to bleed merchants dry. mason’s promise is simple – the AI shopping engine is your brand’s commerce copilot – helping you scale up your business from your store to marketplace to social.
In the future, how do you plan to expand your platform?
The future of commerce is about customers and building products loved by consumers – you need your own copilot. As AI continues to make major strides it is also going to change the relationship between shoppers and brands. From search driven to discovery-first from online stores to shopping agents, we see AI playing a disruptive role in how we shop in the future.
At mason, we are building the copilot for helping brands connect and sell to consumers.
Rob Gamage is Managing Editor of Modern Retail. Combining many years of experience in publishing with a keen interest in small business and entrepreneurship, Rob is passionate about sharing interesting and inspiring content with retailers to help them grow.
