MAM
Lenskart announces its foray into the US market
Mumbai: Homegrown eyewear retailer Lenskart has announced its foray into the USA market and plans to open its first-ever tech centre in the retail capital city – New York.
Lenskart’s new tech hub is under development in New York City with investment to build a highly specialised technical team to tap into mature talent available in the region across product, design & consumer research, said the company in a statement.
“Expanding in the US brings us another step closer to transforming the vision of the world. While the US is a hypercompetitive market, we strongly believe we can bring greater dynamism to the way customers look at eyewear there,” said Lenskart, CEO & co-founder, Peyush Bansal. “Given our scale and global reach, Lenskart has the ability to bring a wide catalogue of over 2000 product styles to the US market, especially for new-age consumption patterns. We are also aiming to build a differentiated, never-seen-before experience backed by our brand, innovation, and technology. Through a Lenskart tech center in the US and dedicated technology & business teams operating from there, we will be successful in growing our business,” he added.
“For us, technical skills are table stakes, beyond that, what we are looking for are engineers with first principal thinking – who are excited to solve problems with a fresh perspective and to work on problems which have not been solved yet at this scale,” stated Lenskart, co-founder, Ramneek Khurana.
Lenskart has recently announced its expansion in Singapore and the Middle East with a projection to achieve growth to the tune of $15 billion by 2025.
The company provides a fully operational website lenskart.us on android play and an iOS app store with free delivery across all regions similar to its current practice in India, Singapore, and Middle East Asia.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
