This mother-daughter duo is taking their legacy business forward with enterprise tech
In 1998, Charoo Aggarwal started tajgifts.com to help NRIs with gifting. It was acquired by Chaitime, then de-merged into tajonline.com. It was acquired by Grass Roots UK, then de-merged into a loyalty company, GRG India. Today, her daughter Khushy leads the company's foray into B2B SaaS space.
In 1998, long before the ecommerce boom played out and selling and buying online became an everyday thing, Charoo Aggarwal started a company called tajgifts.com to enable NRIs to gift their relatives back in India.
Married at 19 into a business family with diverse interests that included cinema halls, petrol pumps, fabrication of tankers for the petrochemical industry, and more, Aggarwal decided to pursue a short course in computer programming and design.
Charoo and Khushy Aggarwal
“During the early years of my marriage, my brother-in-law, who was in the US, saw an opportunity--NRIs wanted to send gifts back to family and friends in India. There was no creditable and legit way of doing this. He explained this idea to me, and it aligned with the course I was doing,” she recalls.
Aggarwal started designing the platform herself, but half-way through realised it needed experts to carry it through.
Tajgifts.com started out as a garage operation and featured flowers, cakes, chocolates, Indian mithai, watches, holiday packages, and books, and introduced gift certificates in the second year—a multi-category platform that was a forerunner to the ecommerce boom that was to follow.
Aggarwal says that the market was filled with fly-by-night operators during that time and the premise and success of Taj Gifts came from the credibility it offered.
“We used only branded items. For example, the Taj Group for holiday gift packages, confectionery from top houses or five-star hotels. Even our flowers came from the best florists. We also tied up with Blue Dart for delivery and were one of the first to have an online payment gateway with ICICI and did not compromise on the kind of vendors we had on the website,” she explains.
Just through word-of-mouth publicity and smart marketing, Taj Gifts became very popular. Aggarwal recalls the Raksha Bandhan period where they came up with the idea of a Rakhi thali (unique at that time), and it became a huge hit. With no outside investment and social media non-existent during that time, she recalls that smart marketing came to their aid. People buying gifts from their website would get coupons they could distribute to family and friends and that became a kind of a referral programme.
“In those days, NRIs typically searched websites for information about visas, baby names, Indian recipes. Indiatimes.com had started its digital news website at that time. We kind of co-partnered with all these websites to provide them an affiliate, white label solution for gifting. For shaadi.com, we powered a Shaadi Gift Shop and we also partnered with a number of websites frequented by NRIs and almost 70% of our traffic came from these affiliate websites,” she says.
From ecommerce to reward fulfillment
In just two years, Taj Gifts was acquired by Chaitime, a platform way ahead of its time that focused on the Southeast Asian community.
“We were an advertiser on Chaitime, and they were looking to buy an ecommerce platform relevant to their audience. They bought us to set up a Chaitime Bazaar in different countries and we successfully converted Taj Gifts as Chaitime Bazaar,” she says.
When Chaitime shut shop during the dotcom bust, they gave the company back to Aggarwal in lieu of the equity held and she used the technology to rebrand into tajonline.com, that ran from 2001 to 2008.
Aggarwal says that despite the huge response and success, it was still early days in India for ecommerce as Indians were hesitate to shop online or were wary of using credit cards.
In 2008, Tajonline.com was acquired by Grass Roots UK, an incentive company.
“We were looking to leverage the ecommerce platform we had for any other purpose. We did this by repurposing it for reward fulfillment for international as well as domestic loyalty companies. The international companies had big participant bases in India and wanted a burn platform for customers to burn their loyalty points. We provided various interfaces like catalogues or web interfaces to redeem points,” she elaborates.
After partnering with Grassroots for its reward fulfilment in India, Tajonline.com was acquired by the company a couple of years later.
In 2016, this operation demerged into Aggarwal’s own loyalty company, GRG India.
“We built bespoke solutions for clients on the lines of a loyalty program to cater to their needs. We were looking at building technology products to cater to the needs for loyalty and incentive solutions,” she says.
This has led to My Incentives, an end-to-end software to manage and deliver incentives for enterprises, that has led GRG India to pivot as an enterprise SaaS company that simplifies rewards and incentive delivery for employees, sales teams, and channel partners. It was launched in 2021 and also marked the entry of her daughter, Khushy Aggarwal, into GRG India.
After completing her studies in the US, Khushy worked at Bain & Company, across Boston and London.
In 2019, inspired by the startup ecosystem, she moved back to India, working as chief of staff at Drip Capital, which was backed by Accel and Sequoia.
“Being back in India, I started learning more about my mum's company and combined that with the technology-first thinking and skills I built at Drip. I decided to join her and build the company in the SaaS-fintech space,” says Khushy.
Growth and challenges
Khushy breaks down the concept of My Incentives in simple terms.
“It is a sales tool that tells sales staff how much commission or incentive they earn in a month, how much they can earn, and what they need to do to earn those incentives,” she explains.
GRG India’s focus is largely on My Incentives at present, but also provides services to bespoke customers/legacy clients that have been with the parent company for a long time.
For Aggarwal, funding has been the major challenge and reinvesting the profits into building the products has made the growth organic and slow.
“SaaS, fintech, and new age technologies are very different from legacy systems, and we have had to adapt very quickly. Sometimes, that’s challenging,” she says.
Khushy, however, believes that the credibility of the legacy company helps build trust while approaching clients to introduce new offerings.
“I’m able to get into the door and start conversations with big companies because of this trust. That’s a huge benefit,” she says.
So, how do they work together?
“Khushy is my boss, I work for her now,” says Aggarwal, with a laugh, and adds, “She brings with her a love for new technology. She’s now looking at bringing AI into our system, automation, and a great user interface that customers will love. While working on tech innovations in marketing she also leads the sales team.”
Aggarwal says she’s more process-oriented, and manages the financial aspect, delivery and operations.
“I have a vision of making My Incentives a global SaaS product, and taking it to American, European, and Middle Eastern customers. I want GRG India to be the Indian SaaS company selling to the world. I also want to raise funding and scale it into a bigger ARR business,” Kushy signs off.
Edited by Megha Reddy
