Varun Rao joins Aditya Birla Lifestyle Brands as e-commerce category manager for Van Heusen Innerwear and Athleisure

MUMBAI: Career moves inside conglomerates rarely make headlines, but they’re often the clearest signal of where a business thinks its growth actually lies. Varun Rao has stepped into a new role as e-commerce category manager for Van Heusen Innerwear and Athleisure at Aditya Birla Lifestyle Brands Limited, moving out of retail operations and into digital commerce and performance marketing after a little over two years on the retail side.

The shift itself tells a fairly familiar story. Rao spent his time at Aditya Birla Lifestyle Brands climbing steadily through retail operations, group manager first, then deputy general manager, based out of Bengaluru, before this latest pivot into category management for one of the group’s better-known innerwear and athleisure lines. Moving from physical retail operations into e-commerce category management isn’t merely a lateral shuffle, it reflects a broader pattern playing out across Indian fashion and lifestyle conglomerates, where digital channels are increasingly where the real battle for market share and margin is being fought.

The path here is worth noting too. Before joining Aditya Birla, Rao spent close to four years at Pidilite Industries, working across market development and branch management roles in Telangana and the Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh, where he managed a monthly revenue base of close to Rs 4 crore across more than 6,500 outlets spanning categories from kirana stores to hardware and plumbing suppliers. He also picked up the Gladiator Scorecard recognition, ranking first all-India for four consecutive months on a range of sales operations parameters, a fairly rare feat in a metric-driven FMCG sales environment.

There’s an unusual detour in the résumé too: a three-year stint attempting the UPSC Civil Services examination, specialising in political science and international relations, during which Rao cleared both the preliminary and main examinations and reached the interview stage, one of roughly 2,000 candidates to do so out of a million applicants, before ultimately returning to a sales and marketing career at Pidilite.

None of this amounts to a dramatic story, career transitions within large conglomerates rarely are. But Rao’s trajectory, FMCG distribution, retail operations, and now e-commerce category management, maps neatly onto how Indian consumer businesses are reorganising their talent to chase digital growth without abandoning the operational rigour that FMCG and retail careers instil early on.