In the Room with Rathna Sharad, Founder and CEO of FlavorCloud
Another episode of The Room Podcast with Madison and Claudia is now live!
This week, we welcome Rathna Sharad, Founder and CEO of FlavorCloud into The Room. FlavorCloud is a one-stop shop for international shipping, providing customers with the best international shipping rates and fastest delivery routes. The platform can be integrated easily into any shopping cart of 3PL system, resulting in an 80% average increase in international cart conversions. Rathna shares her journey from growing up in Chennai, Southern India to serving as Microsoft’s Director of Product Management and now Founder and CEO. In 2021, she was named one of Forbes’s Next 1000 upstart entrepreneurs who are redefining the American dream.
This episode’s key themes include making “anywhere to anywhere” shipping more accessible to smaller businesses, the increasingly higher expectations of online consumers, and the future of the supply chain as we recover from COVID. Let’s open the door.
And a huge congratulations to the FlavorCloud team as well for announcing their Series A raise of $6.3 million led by Mucker Capital!
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Key Theme 1: Making “anywhere to anywhere” shipping more accessible to smaller businesses
In 2013, Rathna founded Runway2Street, a marketplace that enabled fashion brands to sell to a global audience, and this company would ultimately lay the foundation for FlavorCloud and its work on making shipping and returns easy and affordable for everyone. FlavorCloud created the web services for the logistical “anywhere to anywhere” infrastructure that ultimately allows any brand to offer a seamless international shipping experience. It doesn’t matter if you are a big box retailer or a mid-market ecommerce direct to consumer brand, as FlavorCloud can be plugged into any service. As a result, any brand can become a global one.
“You really don’t need to be focused on a specific country. It’s no longer how you think about e-commerce. You really think about your end consumer. Who does your brand resonate with? How do you connect with them? It doesn’t matter where they are. The true power of e-commerce really is that you can sell to anybody anymore,” says Rathna.
Key Theme 2: Increasingly higher expectations of online consumers
Rathna views consumer behavior as the fundamental change agent. Consumers are inpatient and expect the free shipping and returns model for nearly all orders now. With the domestic model even hard to tackle, finding a seamless international shipping experience faces even more obstacles, including trade tariffs, regulatory barriers, specific regulations, and more. Ultimately, Rathna views the international shipping model shifting to a free shipping one in the next two years.
Key Theme 3: The future of the supply chain as we recover from COVID
With the COVID-19 pandemic, digitally native e-commerce brands did better than brick and mortar retailers who couldn’t move products fast enough. One of the key issues that Rathna heard with these retailers was struggling to get products in on time and in a consistent, reliable manner. Rathna says that supply chain redundancy and resilience built in will be key going forward and not only in terms of e-commerce but from a B2B standpoint as well. She also sees supply chains moving into more nimble cycles as businesses rethink how to do manufacturing and fulfillment processes.
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Thank you so much for listening to our conversation with Rathna!
We are so inspired by her journey and hope you enjoyed it. Tune in next week for a brand new episode launching Tuesday, March 8 at 7AM PST/10AM EST.
See you next week!
Stream our episode on Spotify
