Where Are They Now: Ashmeet Kandhari, CEO of Rex Brown

The LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme has celebrated more than 300 exceptional individuals since its launch in 2018. In this series, we reconnect with some of our alumni to find out what happened next in their growth journey, the impact of being part of the programme, and their ambitions now.

In 2008, Ashmeet Kandhari joined his family business, Rex Brown. He has since transformed the former cash-and-carry into a global e-commerce specialist, which helps some of the world’s biggest brands to build their presence online. Kandhari was featured in The LDC Top 50 in 2020, just as the pandemic took hold.

“We focused on profitability and stability during that time,” he says. “This year, we are on track to deliver 40% growth.” Rex Brown specialises in finding emerging marketplaces and helping brands to get up and running fast. “We were the first business to fully integrate with TikTok Shop,” he says. “We were building shops there before many people had even heard of it. Now it’s our second-biggest channel.”

Do you plan to expand overseas?

We have wanted to go international for a while but that was a high-risk strategy when the macro economic environment was difficult. Now, we are investing heavily in India. There is a rising middle class and huge demand for a service like ours. Indian brands are looking to enter the UK and our existing customers here in the UK want to go to India, so it’s win win.

How are you driving sustainable growth?

A few years ago, we were totally focused on finding efficiencies, creating automatic packing lines that dramatically reduced the cardboard we used for shipping. More recently, we focused on software. We now have a full in-house software suite, built by us, to manage everything from warehousing to orders. It’s a modular system, which allows us to roll out into new warehouses and countries using nothing but a few mobile phones and a label printer.

What are your plans for the future?

We are looking at several new and emerging channels right now. We are also looking at ways to become more relevant to challenger brands, perhaps through an investment incubator model, which will give them access to our infrastructure. We would give them real operational support and execution capabilities in return for equity, thereby closely aligning our objectives with those of the brand.