Pawan has close to 20 years of work experience in Retail, Housing, Digital, Content and Commerce.

Some of key highlights are, being a part of startup team of Big Bazaar to heading marketing function for Future Retail.

Currently leading Digital at Future Group, he is spearheading online and offline for all Future Group formats and also driving ecommerce businesses.

He has been awarded as Digital Marketing leader by Internet and Mobile Association of India and Marketer of the Year-Retail by IAA Leadership Awards.

Vineeta Singh is the CEO of SUGAR Cosmetics, India's fastest growing beauty brand with a distribution network of 1000+ branded retail outlets in more than 100+ cities. She is a TEDx Speaker and alumnus of IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad. She is also a triathlete and ultramarathoner.

Clovia (Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd)

Pankaj Vermani is a serial entrepreneur and has co-founded and grown two companies in the past, which went through successful acquisition and got featured in multiple global forums including Red Herring Asia 100 and Deloitte India Fast 50. In his previous role, he was heading the Incubator / Company-Builder Mountain Apollo India, an initiative of Mountain Partners AG Zurich. Pankaj's latest venture is Clovia, one of the fastest-growing Lingerie brands in India. The brand sells a unit every 6 seconds through its online and offline channels. Over the years the brand has won several awards including Super Start-up Asia 2018, and India Retail Awards 2019. Pankaj actively advises and mentors start-ups in the internet, mobile, e-com, consumer and ed-tech space. He writes regularly for technology blogs on team building, scale, and business strategy. In his free time, he is a theatre buff and performs in the Professional Theatre Circle. He is a Reiki Practitioner for over 20yrs. Pankaj was awarded the Young Entrepreneur Award by Business World and Retail CEO of the Year @ Global Leadership Awards. He is a graduate from IIT Delhi, a premier Engineering Institution In India.

Liberty Shoes Limited

Equipped with a graduation degree in Economics from Delhi’s prestigious Shriram College of Commerce, Anupam Bansal went on to acquire a background in footwear designing from ArsSutoria of Italy. His association with the Liberty brand for about 30 years, is in his own words, has been ‘a journey of personal discovery and professional evolution’.

Anupam brought in many remarkable retail practices to the brand, which today has a robust network of 425 exclusive stores across India and aims to achieve 1000 crore turnover by 2022 – smart retail design to revamp the brand identity of the household footwear brand, clever in-store displays, vital visual merchandising, introducing various focal points inside the stores and many more.

Anupam’s penchant to continuously raise the bar added a new proposition to Liberty which evolved from being perceived as a family footwear brand that offered the best value for moneyto becoming a lifestyle brand for those who see themselves as part of the happening set defined by the latest trends, global class and tasteful appreciation of beauty.

Anupam spends quality time in investing in right kind of sales force at company-owned stores and he is well known in garnering performance drive amongst his team members. He conducts regular motivational exercises to provide the partners with regular updates on the latest innovative sales strategies that they can adopt to build the most effective rapport with buyers.

Marks & Spencer

Darshana Srivastava, Currently heading Visual Merchandising & Styling for Marks & Spencer Reliance India Pvt. Ltd. has around 17 years of Retail experience earned from some of the finest Indian and International Retail Brands.

Being a dynamic brand presentation professional, with an excellent visual skills, she is currently into constructing an aspirational customer experience within both business and creative environments. Having opportunity to have worked for both Retail & Visual functions have only added to a magnified gamut of overall knowledge & understanding of various formats of Retail Business.

Darshana has successfully built this amazing career by adapting and managing some of the most challenging roles within retail operations, brand styling & visual merchandising with some of the very different and demanding brand/business & commercial requirements.

In her words, “I feel blessed to have grown from store, collaborated & worked with some of the best colleagues, mentors, industry leaders & teams - most of them had a huge contribution in shaping my overall growth and professional journey. My endeavour now is to share my learnings with as many as possible & support everyone possible in achieving & delivering nothing but the best.”

Croma – Infiniti Retail

Ritesh is a student of human behaviour and its reflection in marketplace choices and the implications for products, propositions, brands and their communication. Over the last two decades, he has built a track record of creating new brands (Tata Docomo, Minute Maid), re-inventing legacy brands (Photon, Thumps Up, Maaza) and adapting global brands to Indian realities (Coke, Fanta, Sprite.

As CMO at Croma, he is responsible for all aspects of demand generation – brand, communication, media, insights, customer lifecycle management. He also manages private label, institutional business and property for Croma.

An alumnus of IIM Bangalore, Ritesh started his career in advertising and market research agencies before moving onto a marketing assignment at Reckitt Benckiser.

Ever restless and seeking the thrill of a new challenge, he has worked in 10 organizations across FMCG, Telecom and Retail. His two longest and most remarkable stints have been at Coca Cola India and Tata Docomo.

Perfetti Van Melle,

Siddhartha is an IIM (Lucknow), IIT(BHU), Varanasi graduate with 16+ years of experience in Sales, Customer & Shopper Marketing & Retail experience across Perfetti Van Melle, Mondelez (earlier Cadbury), Aditya Birla Retail & ITC Ltd. He has received various awards including “Winner, BU SAMEA Impact Cup Award for Wsale Turn around” – Perfetti 2017, “Winner, BU SAMEA Impact Cup Award for Change Mgmt” – Perfetti 2018, “Most influential 50 Rural Marketing Professionals in India”, 2017 – CMO Asia, “Best Channel Loyalty Program”, 2017 – Customer Loyalty Awards, MD’s Club, 2011 – Cadbury India, “Best Regional Customer Marketing Manager” 2011 – Cadbury India, Best insights in ‘Amazing Anjali’ project, 2013 – Cadbury India.

Siddhartha leads Sales for West region at Perfetti Van Melle and in the past has built high impact programs for trade, incorporated In-Store strategy and designed various sales incentive interventions. Other roles in the past have been leading Nepal business, Transformation office role & leading Private Label.

Tata Starbucks Ltd.

Vishal is with the retail industry for the last 20 years and has worked with companies like The Bombay Store, Shoppers Stop, Hypercity, Trent Limited etc. Currently, he is associated with Tata Starbucks as Head of Projects, Renovations & Facilities

In a tenure spanning across 20 years, Vishal has donned multiple hats and have handled roles in Operations, Business Development, Store Planning and Projects. He is also a qualified Chartered Accountant and a Visiting Faculty at WE School for the last 17 years.

Marico Limited

In a career spanning across 17 years, Shivajyoti has worked with FMCG majors in India – ITC Limited, Modelez International and Marico Limited. He has held various positions in brand management, sales, digital strategies and trade marketing. In his current role, Dash leads the Modern Trade and Institutional Business for Marico Limited and his key impact areas include Channel P&L Delivery, Joint Business

Planning with Customers, Instore Execution and impact, leading Catman initiatives, leveraging channel-specific opportunities to drive premiumisation and uptrading.

Lakme Lever

CEO, Soch Apparels Limited

Jaydeep Shetty was the Founder & former CEO of MINERAL, a women’s western wear brand that retails through 150 retail touchpoints across 29 cities in India, primarily at CENTRAL, Shoppers Stop and Brand Factory.

Shetty was part of the Founding Management Team of Shoppers Stop, BBC Worldwide, Inox Cinemas and Central Department stores, all in leadership positions. He has also incubated international joint ventures at Future Group. He has a total of 28 years of experience across Retail, Cinema and Media. He joined Soch in December 2019 and is responsible for fuelling growth, charting expansion and firmly establishing the brand in the womenswear segment in India, working closely with the Soch management including Vinay Chatlani, Co Founder and Executive Director of the company, to steer the brand’s growth story in the new decade.

Jaydeep is an MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies Mumbai, and does professional theatre as an actor.

Mithun is a well-known leader in the FMCG Food & Beverage industry with expertise across the spectrum of Sales, key account management, brand , customer marketing, logistics, business development, P&L management, developing new business channels, E-commerce, and start-up acceleration. He is a regular in the industry meets as well as a speaker in experts panel across the spectrum of food and consumer startups in India and abroad. He is also on the international panel of judges for the Gama innovation awards out of Manchester -UK.

He is presently the CEO & Executive Director of Innovative Foods Ltd makers of the brand Sumeru, which has a heritage of 30+ years in the frozen foods industry with a distribution network of 170+ towns in India and into 15+ nations across the globe along with being food services supplier to very large marque QSR chains. Under his leadership, Brand Sumeru has achieved phenomenal milestones – an achievement of highest-ever revenue growth in the past two decades, meaningful category expansion within the brand, drastic General Trade coverage and remarkable growth in the export market.

Mithun has spent meaningful tenures in FMCG majors like Nestle, Brittania, UB Group and ID Foods. He has been instrumental in creating innovative business ideas and execution specializations in various roles that he has handled. He has been an advisory member to startups at the Wadwani foundation and part of the board of studies panel for IFIM business school. He is credited to have published various articles and also is a recipient of several awards and recognitions.

Deal Jeans

Apeksha’s dive into entrepreneurship was prompted by her attitude of knowing what she wanted to achieve at every step she took forth. Born to a businessman having strong hold in the garment industry, fashion has always been imbibed in her genes. After pursuing education in Fashion Designing, Apeksha cracked her first job at the age of 18. A journey that began at a mere age of 18 years as a fashion designer at Deal Jeans holds great pride in being acknowledged as the CEO of Deal Jeans today. After gaining substantial experience at Deal Jeans through this journey, Apeksha went on category expansion for the brand by launching new product segments - contemporary handbags brand, E2o Fashion in 2012. It complemented the apparel brand with the much needed boost with the accaesories line, which back then, was an uncommon category in organized retail. Deal Jeans has created an interesting bandwidth of store network across demographics – metros, -tier town and as well as some international markets.

Fabindia Overseas Pvt. Ltd.

Sumita is an architect with 20 years of work experience in design and project management, while half of her experience tenure has been spent in retail design. She has worked with eminent brands like BIBA Apparels, EVOK etc. for long stints. In her current role, she heads the Projects at Fabindia Overseas and she is responsible for leading Pan India store roll outs for Fabindia across its various retail store formats - Experience Centers, Company-owned and Franchise outlets. During her two years of stint at one of India’s iconic brands, Fabindia, 150+ stores have been rolled out and the brand won accolades like winning the title, “Store Design of the Year”, awarded by Retailers Association of India (RAI).

Project Eve – Reliance Retail

Currently working as head, Visual Merchandising & Experience design for Project Eve (Part of Reliance Retail), Unni Augustine has hands-on experience of more than a 20 years in the retail industry practicing Store Design, Planning, Visual Merchandising and Store Roll-Out Management.

He is a graduate in Fashion Design from National Institute of Fashion Technology and has worked with premier brands in India like Shoppers’ Stop, Titan, Aditya Birla, House of Anita Dongre and Reliance Retail.

He has been actively involved with institutions like the National Institute of Fashion Technology, NID and Retail Association of India (RAI). While not working, his interests are travelling, sports, music, movies and photography.