Taking a Traditional Business Online Means Changing How It Runs
Taking a Traditional Business Online Means Changing How It Runs
From 2020 to 2023 I co-founded Bunawat and led the digital transformation of a 40 year old brick and mortar apparel business. The goal was not to launch an e-commerce website. It was to build an omnichannel brand that could scale. A few lessons from that work apply well beyond retail.
A website is not a transformation
Putting a catalogue online is the easy part. The harder part is changing the operating model behind it: how stock is tracked, how orders are fulfilled, how returns are handled and how customers are served across several channels at once. If those processes stay the same, the website only exposes their limits faster.
Choose your growth model deliberately
We chose to invest in a community of resellers, influencers and customers rather than relying mainly on paid acquisition. It was a trade-off between speed and capital efficiency. It meant growth depended on trust and relationships, which take longer to build but cost less to keep. Paid marketing stayed below 15% of GMV.
Service quality is the product
In apparel, returns and customer experience decide whether people come back. Building operational processes that kept service quality high across every sales channel mattered as much as anything we did in marketing. Keeping returns below 12% was a result of that operational work, not a separate goal.
Respect what already works
A family business that has lasted forty years knows a lot about its customers. The job was to keep that knowledge and give it new channels, not to replace it with something that looked modern but forgot why customers trusted the business in the first place.
The product lesson
The same thinking carries into enterprise software. Digital tools only help when the process behind them changes too, and the people who already run that process are the best guide to what should stay.
Junisha skipped presentations and built real AI products.
Junisha Malkani was part of the August 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 24 other talented participants.