Ajaita Shah's social commerce platform leverages the social capital of women in the villages to listen to the pulse of rural consumers and herald an ecommerce revolution in the hinterlands
New York-born Ajaita Shah came to India in 2005 and has been working in villages for over a decade
For Ajaita Shah, last year’s lockdown in rural India was weird. “Are you kidding me,” wondered the founder of Frontier Markets, a rural women-assisted social commerce platform. What baffled Shah, who started the business in 2011 and gradually spread operations across the hinterlands of Rajasthan, Bihar, UP and Odisha over the last decade, was the feedback from most of her 3,000 women salesforce. The sahelis—women salesforce, who started working for Shah from 2015 onwards—made a strong pitch: “We need to start selling washing machines this wedding season.”
(This story appears in the 18 June, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)