MUMBAI: The online global fashion and lifestyle brand American Swan has appointed Maria Molland to the company’s board of directors.
Optimistic about her association with a vibrant brand like American Swan Maria Molland said, "It feels exciting to join a young, dynamic brand and there is a massive opportunity for American Swan vis-?-vis the increasing amount of capital going into emerging markets. I look forward to bringing my expertise to the brand and help them expand their impressive product range in global markets, as they enter their next stage of growth”
As a new entrant in the e-commerce space, American Swan is one of the rare examples that has adopted fast and strived for efficiency in a competitive domain. Its initiative to adopt the hybrid model by venturing into online and offline channels simultaneously has helped it maximise reach and de-risk the business. The growth for the American Swan brand has been fairly fast-paced, encouraging and consistent. So expanding the brand’s footprint globally after establishing itself in India was an inevitable next step.
American Swan director and CEO Anurag Rajpal added, “We are delighted to have Maria Molland join us. She brings broad, international experience and deep knowledge of the e-commerce industry. We are confident that the perspective she brings to American Swan and its Board is extremely valuable, given our strategic priorities of International presence and ecommerce growth.”
Molland will bring her vast experience in ecommerce to advise American Swan on international expansion as it seeks to be the leading online fashion brand in emerging markets apart from bringing the best ecommerce practices. American Swan has grown quickly in the Indian e-commerce domain by offering a range of classic preppy fashion and authentic smart casuals to the urban fashion-conscious consumers who seek International brands and styling. It is rapidly expanding to other emerging markets in Asia.
Molland is an executive who recently served as the chief European officer at Fab.com, one of the fastest growing ecommerce companies. The European business grew from negligible to more than 40 per cent of Fab’s global revenues during her tenure.
Prior to Fab, Molland was the global managing director of Digital Ventures at Thomson Reuters where she managed teams in the US, Europe, India, China and the Middle East. Molland has also held global executive roles at Dow Jones and Yahoo.
India has close to 10 million online shoppers and is growing at an estimated 3 per cent CAGR and is poised to witness significant growth in the next few years. It has been speculated that the industry will touch a benchmark of $34.2 billion by 2015. As the e-commerce business is growing by leaps and bounds, the growth in the sector is a reflection of evolving nature of the market and that of the consumer. American Swan as a new, dynamic brand is seeking avenues to increase its presence through top online aggregators like Myntra, Jabong, and Flipkart as well as through a strong retail footprint pan India. Four Cross Media (www.fourcrossmedia.com), a high-end global digital media conglomerate with a network of innovative businesses has invested Rs 40 crore in this venture.
“We welcome Molland at American Swan. There are not many entrepreneurs who have had the chance to scale companies from small teams to hundreds of people globally, and Maria has done that. We are looking forward to leveraging her expertise with fast growing technology companies as we continue to grow our business," says Four Cross Media Asia co-founder and managing director Puneet Johar.
