Peyush Bansal

Some Lesser Known Facts About Peyush Bansal

• Peyush Bansal is an Indian entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of the eyewear chain Lenskart.

• He grew up in a middle-class family in Delhi.

• After completing his graduation, Peyush started working as a Program Manager at Microsoft, Redmond, Washington in 2007. There he focused on improving customer experience. He worked there for around a year and subsequently, resigned from his position in the firm and returned to India.

• He wanted to set up his own firm in India and started looking for business ideas.

• In 2007, Bansal launched a campus classifieds portal called SearchMyCampus. The portal connected college students with different service providers like accommodation, internships, transportation, books, and part-time jobs.

• He then launched a few more startups that were fairly successful. However, he wanted to achieve something bigger.

• In 2010, Peyush, along with Amit Chaudhary and Sumeet Kapahi launched Lenskart, an online portal selling contact lenses. The company that started by selling only contact lenses, expanded its operations and began selling eyeglasses and sunglasses within a year.

  

• His project Lenskart has funded many of his eyewear startups including John Jacobs (2015), Aqualens (2019), Lenskart Plus (2020), and Lenskart Vision Fund (2020).

• In 2019, Lenskart became a unicorn with its net assets being $1.5 billion; a unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion.

 

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• As of 2022, Lenskart has around 600 retail stores and around 4000 employees spread across 450 cities in the country.

• In December 2021, Bansal appeared as one of the sharks (judges) in the Indian business reality TV show ‘Shark Tank India.’ The show is an Indian adaptation of the American show ‘Shark Tank.’

  

• In his spare time, Peyush likes to travel and watch films.

• He considers the American business magnate Bill Gates his role model.

• The Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif is the brand ambassador of Bansal’s company Lenskart.

  

• Peyush is often spotted consuming alcohol on various occasions.

  

• In an interview, when asked what success meant to him, Peyush replied,
  

  It’s about breaking your own standards every time and bringing an element of joy in the lives of your customers and employees.”

• In an interview, while sharing how he thought of starting Lenskart, Bansal said,
  

  I wanted to do something on the Internet. My first venture (Searchmycampus), which was centred on college students, wasn’t purely about e-commerce. It was mainly about connecting college students to someone who can provide services to them – very similar to classifieds. The only thing we were not doing was making a transaction on the Internet. The ads on the website earned us revenues. We also built websites for colleges and those who owned hostels. But the model that primarily worked was selling leads to educational institutes and PGs. Classifieds, as a model, was not making money and was not scalable. We wanted to do something that would scale up fast. That is when we shifted gears and came up with the idea of LensKart. We launched LensKart.com with the help of some funding. This left us with huge targets. Gradually, we found that it was not possible to keep Searchmycampus.com live since we would not have been able to attend to customers. We then shut Searchmycampus.com in 2010 as we did not have time and energy to look for someone to sell it off.”

• In an interview, when Peyush was asked to share his Lenskart journey, he said,
  

  Lenskart.com is India’s largest online retailer of fashionable and stylish eyeglasses, sunglasses and contact lenses. Started in 2010, Lenskart.com has today firmly established its position as the leading eye-wear portal in the country. In the last three years, the company has seen remarkable growth with a 300 per cent increase in its turnover and an employee strength that currently stands at 150. Lenskart.com offers over 5,000 stylish frames and glasses and more than 45 kinds of high quality, scratch-resistant and unbreakable branded contact lenses. It offers one of the biggest selections of prescribed and fashion eye-wear from all leading manufacturers of the world such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, Tag Heuer, Fastrack, Sprint, Vintage, Johnson & Johnson, Ciba Vision, Bausch + Lomb, CooperVision, etc. As of now, it’s been funded by two venture capitalists, namely IDG Ventures and Ronnie Screwvala-led Unilazer Ventures.”

  He added,

  Already delivering in more than 450 cities in India, the website offers unparalleled services such as help for eye-wear selection online, stringent quality checks, personalised services, prompt deliveries, one year product warranty, 14-days no-questions-asked return policy, convenient payment options and unbeatable prices. The fact that there is no middleman involved means the company can pass on the benefit of reduced costs to the customers in the form of almost 70% lower prices. The frames at Lenskart.com are crafted in some of the finest production lines in the world and are inspected thrice before being delivered.”