KLAY appoints Sudarshan Swaminathan as vice president marketing

BENGALURU: KLAY, India’s largest preschool and daycare chain, has pulled off a rather clever cross-sector poach, bringing in Sudarshan Swaminathan as vice president marketing at a moment when the early-childhood education business is scaling fast and competing harder for parental trust.

Swaminathan’s CV is not the obvious preschool-marketing résumé, and that is precisely the point. He spent nearly six years at Unilever cutting his teeth on consumer insights, portfolio growth and go-to-market strategy, before moving into consumer technology at VIVO and iQOO, where he ran brand strategy and consumer engagement in two of India’s most brutally competitive smartphone markets. An IIM Ahmedabad management degree rounds out a background built for exactly the kind of brand-salience and digital-outreach mandate KLAY has handed him. Translating smartphone-market instincts into a preschool brand is not a stretch so much as a deliberate bet: parents are consumers too, and KLAY clearly wants someone who has fought for share of wallet in a crowded market before.

The job itself is broad. Swaminathan takes charge of KLAY’s overall marketing strategy, with responsibility for strengthening brand salience, deepening parent engagement and sharpening digital and consumer outreach as the company pushes growth across markets. Abhishek Joshi, KLAY’s chief executive, framed the hire as central to the company’s next scaling phase, calling Swaminathan’s mix of strategic marketing expertise, consumer understanding and growth orientation invaluable, language that suggests KLAY sees marketing as a genuine growth lever rather than a support function.

The scale KLAY is operating at makes the hire look well timed. The chain runs over 180 self-managed centres across more than 20 cities, backed by over 500 corporate partnerships and a workforce exceeding 3,500, serving more than 80,000 families since its founding in 2011. That is a business built on trust as much as footprint, and Swaminathan’s own comment, about strengthening the brand and deepening family connections, reads like a marketer who understands the category is emotional first and transactional second. For KLAY, betting on outside-category talent to build a category-defining brand looks like a smart, well-calculated move.