Nestle India's top exec Vikas Ahuja joins Myntra as chief marketing officer

Bangalore-based Myntra Designs Pvt Ltd, which runs the lifestyle e-commerce site Myntra.com, has appointed Vikas Ahuja as its chief marketing officer (CMO). In this role, Ahuja will be responsible for sales & marketing operations and will also spearhead the overall brand strategy at Myntra.

Ahuja comes with more than 18 years of experience in sales & marketing. Prior to joining Myntra, he was the country business manager for Nestle India. He has been with Nestle for more than a decade, serving in various roles, and has worked for some of its popular brands like Bar-One, Milky-Bar, Kit-Kat, Munch, Nescafé and Maggi. Ahuja is a graduate from St. Xavier's College in Kolkata and holds an MBA degree from IIM Calcutta.

"Our focus is to be the next-generation fashion destination in the country. Ahuja has an excellent track record of building and scaling businesses, and will be an asset in helping us shape and create the next phase in our evolution," said Mukesh Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Myntra.

Founded in 2007 by a group of IIT and IIM graduates, Myntra has offices in Bangalore and Delhi. The company secured an additional $25 million (between the third and the fourth quarter of 2012) from existing investors Tiger Global and Accel Partners. Prior to that, it had raised $20 million in Series C funding in early 2012, led by Tiger Global. The e-commerce venture has raised a total of $65 million in institutional funding till date.

Myntra is now looking to raise $100 million in a fresh round of funding (read here for more).

Such movements from non-internet sector individuals to leading online companies has been gaining momentum lately. In the last 1-2 years we have seen ecom majors like Snapdeal, redBus, eBay or even Flipkart hiring top honchos from non-internet sectors. Earlier this year, eBay India appointed former category head, Motorcycles at Mahindra Two Wheelers Ltd Alok Agarwal as director, marketing. Before that we saw Microsoft top executive Jaspreet Bindra joining local search and classifieds platform Getit as CEO. Bindra was former regional director (retail, entertainment & devices) at Microsoft before he joined Getit. Horizontal ecommerce site Snapdeal also roped in Aakash Moondhra, former Bharti Retail executive, as its chief financial officer. Such cross-sectional top-level movements indicate a strong trend of retail, FMCG and technology executives moving to internet ventures. This could be due to lack of senior professionals in the internet sector or purely because of more lucrative opportunities the newer companies are offering.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)