Reading not only gives us varied pleasure and intellectual satisfaction but also lifts our mind from our hectic life into the world of imagination. In this generation where the advanced technology is reshaping our reading and learning habits entirely, Rokomari has emerged with the idea to enrich the fondness of people to read by making books easily accessible to them. Back in 2012, former BUET graduate Mahmudul Hasan Sohag, Chairman of Onnorokom Group dreamt of serving books to peoples’ door step which was completely a new concept back in those days. Gradually, this one new idea gave birth to more and made Rokomari a consistent player of the country’s ecommerce arena. Of late, MBR had an opportunity to have a one-to-one conversation with the founder of Rokomari.com, Mr. Mahmudul Hasan Sohag and re-discover how the continuous trial and error shaped Rokomari.com and made it appear as a role-model of the e-commerce sector of Bangladesh.

MBR: How the idea of Rokomari was put into a business model?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: My work process is rather chaotic than organized. Thus, I would suggest not to follow my method. As per Myers and Briggs personality types, I am categorized as ENTP, who are highly intuitive. Thus, a lot of my decisions are rather intuition based. In case of Rokomari as well, I did not follow any proper business model. In fact, I was not even familiar with Business Model Canvas framework back then. However, we thought about the process step by step; if we want to serve books to people what should be the process or steps and what bottlenecks we have there to overcome. The 1st step was to enter the names of books and authors. It was in the month of January 2012, thus, most of the publishers did not take us seriously Rather they thought we were one of those seasonal birds who want to work with books only around February for book fair. However, we did not leave the battle field. The 2nd step was to create a website which wasn’t a difficult task for us as all the three business partners of Rokomari are from BUET, with good knowledge on that field. So dealing with technological issues was not something challenging for us. The step which was challenging for us was the methods we would use to deliver the product and collect the payments. Due to trust issues regarding online service, we have decided to do cash on delivery rather than credit card payments. But for the cash on delivery we needed a suitable delivery service provider whom we could rely on. This was the biggest bottleneck for our idea to come to fruition. When we have contacted Sundarban courier service, they only had the delivery service but they didn’t have the cash on delivery service. In other words, they would not collect the payments but later they did decide to design the cash on delivery just for us. As a matter of fact, we still deliver books to the rural areas via postal service. That’s how we have constructed the idea of Rokomari into a business model.

MBR: What was the biggest turning point of Rokomari’s growth and when did it happen?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: The third year, 2014 was the biggest turning point of Rokomari’s growth as we started dealing with data. E-commerce is a data driven business and initially we didn’t have adequate knowledge on how to deal with data or handle data but gradually we started to learn and use google analytics. As we moved to data driven decision making process, it contributed to our growth to a great extent. Now, we have 160 to 170 full-time employees and another 60 to 70 contractual employees in our organization forming a team of very young people. Starting from the scratch, through continuous learning and entirely private investment i.e. without any external investment, Rokomari has grown to what it is today.
Reading not only gives us varied pleasure and intellectual satisfaction but also lifts our mind from our hectic life into the world of imagination. In this generation where the advanced technology is reshaping our reading and learning habits entirely, Rokomari has emerged with the idea to enrich the fondness of people to read by making books easily accessible to them. Back in 2012, former BUET graduate Mahmudul Hasan Sohag, Chairman of Onnorokom Group dreamt of serving books to peoples’ door step which was completely a new concept back in those days. Gradually, this one new idea gave birth to more and made Rokomari a consistent player of the country’s ecommerce arena. Of late, MBR had an opportunity to have a one-to-one conversation with the founder of Rokomari.com, Mr. Mahmudul Hasan Sohag and re-discover how the continuous trial and error shaped Rokomari.com and made it appear as a role-model of the e-commerce sector of Bangladesh.

MBR: If you look at the journey of Rokomari, what would you consider Rokomari’s biggest achievement?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: The biggest achievement of Rokomari, according to me, is the team that we have built. We are proud of our team and here the retention rate is almost close to 100%. Everyone here shares a great bonding with each other. We have built a culture which consists of a few important elements and one of the most important elements is everyone has to be modest, humble and welcoming. This crucial element prevails because of our rigorous recruitment process which assesses the candidate’s ability to fulfill our cultural practice or norms.

MBR: What is the biggest strength or core competency of Rokomari.com?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: The biggest strength of this company is again its team. I believe that a company’s most important asset is its people. We can invest large amount on buying new software but we cannot buy a ready-made team and expect the team to be functional or to improve the team work. So our core strength is our team.

MBR: What was the biggest failure in the journey of Rokomari so far and how Rokomari capitalizes on the learning of that failure?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: We shouldn’t use the word ‘failure’ instead we can use the word ‘experience’ because failure sounds very negative. We did undergo many good and bad experiences through out our learning process. As we learned to handle data and work with growth hacking, we realized that we should have started working on these earlier to make the process faster. So this realization was a lesson for us. Also we have learnt that when the volume of order increases, the process needs to be redefined and till now there has been major process renovation in our supply chain for three or four times and that was another good lesson for us.

MBR: Did Rokomari go through any major operational changes over the year? And why the changes were important?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: In 2019, we identified several issues in the order process. As we started getting huge responses from our customers, we faced difficulties in giving a delighted experience to our customers with on time delivery. Customers did not receive their deliveries on time which led to higher complaints and we have apologized to all our customers for this bad experience. Sometimes, large volume of order becomes very difficult to manage in the absence of an appropriate structure. To overcome the situation we have embedded continuous monitoring into the system and the operational process has been restructured in order to improve the service operation management.

MBR: What are the strategic priorities of Rokomari at the moment?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: We had an internal discussion a year back on our strategic priorities. It was derived that the international giants like Amazon can become a threat for us if they enter the Bangladeshi market and make it difficult for us to survive here. To be prepared to confront to this challenge, we decided to focus on the blue ocean strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy is referred to a market for a product where there is no or very less competition. This strategy revolves around searching for a business in which very few firms operate and where there is no pricing pressure. At the moment, our strategic priority is to focus mainly on books and create more services related to books. This is because Mahmudul Hasan Sohag Managing Director & CEO if we try to bring diversification with our limited resources, desired outcome may not be achieved. However, we definitely have a plan to diversify in the future keeping books as our major priority.

MBR: What are the challenges Rokomari is facing now? What are the key areas or strategies that are giving Rokomari a competitive advantage?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: Our major challenge is to sustain the niche market we have created and strongly hold on to it. In order to sustain we believe we have to focus on developing a unique selling proposition and identify the areas we need to compete in. Thus, the challenge is to create a platform to differentiate our brand. To that end, our team worked wholeheartedly. We believe human capital is the biggest competitive advantage for any organization. Hence, human capital is our key area where we put our focus for continuous improvement.

MBR: Is there any international online bookstore who Rokomari sees as inspiration? If yes, how does it inspire Rokomari?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: Rokomari was created from our own interest and effort. We have developed our own business model and separate thought process. Even the ways of providing services is not similar to any other bookstores, I believe. But, we definitely take inspiration from the journey of businesses like Amazon. Moreover, the operational structure of Zappos.com is quite similar to that of Rokomari. They also focus on preserving the organizational culture such that, in spite of being undertaken by Amazon, it is maintaining its own approach of conducting the business.

MBR: Is Rokomari going to expand its business in different vertical other than books?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: We have already worked on e-books and are also working on selling second hand books. But, we still need to develope a viable model for penetrating the offline market as we are affiliated to a number of bookstores that order books from us. Apart from storing books, we also provide other related products to complement the books. Pirated books are not sold as we aim to operate in the most ethical way. However, we still could not penetrate the academic book market but nowadays our neighboring countries like India are getting permission to do so. Thus, it might be helpful for us to provide international books in a considerable rate.

MBR: What do you think ecommerce industry will look like 10 years from now?

Mahmudul Hasan Sohag: In this advanced world, e-Commerce has continued to grow at an electric pace, so has the competition. In order to stay competitive in the e-Commerce space, it is imperative that you look down the road a bit. In 10 years, I think we’ll see a great divergence in the e-Commerce world. There will be Amazon on one side, who will be the trusted source for any and all commodity items. On the other side, some independent stores and brands will be there anchored by a branded product line or a highly specialized service offering. Artificial intelligence will be such that it will bring our desired products to our doorsteps without being aware of.