INDIA is still incredible. But when dynamic couple Bela Gupta D’Souza and Nishant D’Souza relocated to the Philippines in 2012, they made the country their “lovely” home.
Before their big move, Nishant worked for an American power company while Bela was the cofounder and chief operating officer of Groupon in Thailand. Once settled here, she founded and was the CEO of AdSpark Philippines and then worked as a managing partner for Decapolis Partners.
More than a decade later, the enterprising couple founded edamama (www.edamama.ph), the Philippines’ leading parenting-focused e-commerce platform. They launched in May 2020 right in the middle of the first ECQ and haven’t looked back since. They’ve grown their gross merchandise value (GMV) on the platform about 100 times since then, and delivered more than 1.5 million products to Filipino doorsteps all across the country.”
“So, edamama was born out of a pain point that we as parents experienced living in the Philippines, where both of our children were born. And we noticed that as young parents today, we are quite digitally savvy. We’re online, seeking out the best products and services for our children. But that experience can feel a little bit overwhelming for first-time parents especially, right? There’s a lot of options. It’s a very search-led process,” Bela explains.
Having gone through the pain points themselves, they felt there was an opportunity to better serve moms and parents more broadly in the Philippines by offering them a much simpler, curated, personalized shopping experience online. And, opportunistically speaking, they also saw that e-commerce was a high potential industry in the Philippines with a very high number of Filipinos now online, very social media-active. So they felt that the timing was right to introduce a purely digital brand, such as edamama, in the market.
“We wanted the word ‘mama’ in the name of our brand, edamama, because our focus is really around the mother. I think a lot of kids’ brands today are focused on the kids. But for us, the central focus is the mother herself. If we can do more to help moms simplify and make better decisions in their parenting journey, then we would done our jobs well,” Bela elaborates.
How do you choose which companies to invite to your platform?
“There’s a lot of thought that goes into brands that we onboard. The difference between edamama and the online marketplace today, is that in a marketplace, a seller can set up their own store online, right? And it’s pretty much self-managed, self-service. In edamama, that’s not how it works. [Our approach is that] if we wouldn’t use this product on our own children, we will not sell it on edamama,” says Bela. “We sought to achieve [that goal] by, firstly, very strong vetting for safety, for quality, for authenticity. No fakes, right? Everything is safe and reliable. And that’s our promise to our customers. So we will take care of the vetting part. So, we take that stress off moms—they don’t have to question is this brand authentic or not,” Bela adds. “And then we curate and we upload the merchandise ourselves. So we’re able to give them not just plenty of product options, but really offer something that’s very curated and personalized and in line with the budget of the mom.”
Our exclusive interview with this inspiring, entrepreneurial couple was at the “edamama Family Expo 2022” over the weekend at the SMX Convention Center at the Mall of Asia Complex. It was their vision to serve the customers where they are, which means that they have to also go offline and mount an in-person event. “We have our own brand, bean. We launched it with the desire to bring a wider selection of quality, affordable baby clothes to our customers. We collaborate with local Filipino artists and designers to come up with unique prints that you won’t find anywhere else in the market. They are limited collections,” Nishant adds. “Alessa Lanot is an example of a Filipino artist that we work with. She’s a watercolor painting artist. So her designs are now on our clothes. Prior to Alessa, we collaborated with the artist Robert Alejandro.”
“About 10 percent of our merchant base today is mompreneurs. It is so important for us to grow that to 20 percent. As a mom myself who is a mompreneur, too, I really want to support mompreneur brands,” says Bela. “Those are the ones we often seek out. We have experienced their products ourselves and we want to give them a platform.”