Saikat SinhaCo-Founder of Preksh Innovations Published On: Thursday, March 03, 2016 Views 4089

"The ONLY TIME success comes before work is in the dictionary."

An IIM alumnus, Saikat Sinha, started his professional journey from Citibank. He took several roles in various companies, which has shaped him into who he is today. Seeing the gap between offline and online shopping experience, he started Preksh Innovations Private Limited, which provides an Augmented Reality Solution for consumers to ‘walk-through’ real brick and mortar stores.

Preksh enables businesses to take their physical stores and transform them into online stores providing rich user experience to the consumers. Preksh combines the way people shop online and offline by using AR technology. The company has already filed for two patents, making it India’s one of few AR solution providers in the retail segment.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Preksh is the Visual Commerce Solution provider. We have developed an Augmented Reality Solution that allow consumers to ‘walk-through’ real brick and mortar stores, ‘pick’ products off the shelves and purchase online while inside the Virtual Store. We have applied for 2 patents related to this technology. We bring in the real-life shopping experience to the consumers. Unique features like ‘Store Enquiry’ allows users to directly ask a questions to the store owner, ‘Sections’ allows users to jump to any section inside the store and ‘Social Share’ where one can take a snapshot inside the real store to share it in social media.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

Consumers shop either online or offline. The advent of ecommerce has increased the online buying in India. While ecommerce bring all the conveniences (assortment of products, home delivery, customer care etc.), shopping as a fun experience is still with the offline stores. At present there are two ways of searching any product online, first ‘The Search Tab’, second ‘Search by category’. But there is a third search prevalent in offline shopping – Search by ‘Looking Around’. Preksh brings in this third category of search online. We are bridging the online-offline retail gap and making online shopping fun & convenient.

What is your life mantra?

I believe life is a story and experiences add flavors to it. So if you want to make yourself the best seller, just focus on gaining experiences.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

Challenges were many, especially when one is trying to provide a solution with Augmented Reality, which is still in a very nascent phase. As our product is visual and it’s all about shopping experience, explaining the same over conversation is indeed challenging.

How did you overcome those challenges?

I strongly believe Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) would gain momentum in 2017. All the big companies across different sectors like retail, automobile, hospitality, manufacturing, real estate are investing in AR/VR. The market is expected to gradually open up, and early players like us would be the flag bearers.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

Our attrition control policy is very simple- allocate task what people enjoy. Even in the most difficult times our attrition rate was zero. I believe some of the softer aspects that had helped are, celebrations at office, playing cricket every Saturday, open door policy, opportunity for self-development and transparency of management actions.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Tenacity, honesty and flexibility

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Give 100% efforts in the right direction

Answer in less than 50 words