Could an MBA help kick-start a vintage clothing start-up?

Abhi Arora grew up with “a healthy dose of delusion and ambition”. In a family of entrepreneurs, it was taken for granted that he and his siblings would start their own businesses. And he is well on the way to fulfilling that ambition as the co-founder of Fleek, an online marketplace for wholesale second-hand fashion, which closed a $20.4mn funding round last year.

An MBA was not automatically a step on that journey, however. MBAs are “hotly debated” in start-up circles, says Arora — particularly whether entrepreneurship can be taught — and he admits to feeling “a bit apprehensive” before starting his programme at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.

Arora had already experienced learning, and working, in some of the hottest start-up communities around the world. He moved from Kolkata in India, where he grew up, to study for an undergraduate business degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. After working in start-ups in San Francisco and Berlin, he moved to London.

By 2018, Arora had decided to start an MBA. Having start-up experience, he was “ready to take that plunge” and create something of his own. But he also wanted to step away from full-time work so he could “ideate” (develop and evaluate potential business ideas), carry out customer research, and “really build something”.

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Studying for an MBA in Cambridge would place him in an “entrepreneurial ecosystem”, while the course would teach the frameworks and strategies used by larger organisations, such as how to scale operations. Having worked in early stage start-ups, the MBA was to be a “shortcut” to gleaning knowledge built up in larger companies.

While the idea for his business came to Arora after he completed the programme, he found that, when it came to entrepreneurship and the MBA, he could arguably have the best of both worlds.

“The thing I realised was: there’s so much knowledge to tap into [on the MBA],” he says. “You can’t really teach entrepreneurship — you learn by doing. However, there are bits and pieces of things that you can pick up that give you a cheat code to do whatever you’re doing better.”

The MBA is being put to use as he builds Fleek from London with his co-founder, Sanket Agarwal. The idea for the business, which launched in 2021, came during the Covid pandemic when Arora, then living near trendy Brick Lane, in the East End, went into a vintage clothing store that was closing down. The owner faced a number of challenges, among them supply problems. Arora learnt that sourcing was an analogue process, with buyers travelling around the world to find goods.

Fleek aims to bring both buyers and sellers online. Sellers tend to be large clothes sorting centres — about 70 per cent of supply is from Pakistan, some 20 per cent from India, and the rest from countries including Thailand and Dubai. The platform enables these suppliers to sell vintage and second-hand clothes in bulk to retailers and resellers primarily in the US, UK, and continental Europe (with France and Germany being the biggest markets).

Arora points to the MBA management praxis class — which focuses on practical aspects of management, touching on organisational behaviour, managing teams and leadership — as an example of how the course has influenced Fleek. The class covered managing very diverse teams and one line struck a chord with Arora: “my world is not your world, and your world is not my world”.

“I think that’s probably been the one thing that really stuck with me as we’ve been able to build,” he says. Fleek now employs about 60 people, of seven nationalities, across offices in three countries (in London, Karachi in Pakistan and Bengaluru in India).

Another class Arora enjoyed — but never thought you could teach — was negotiation. He found the topic “fascinating”, learning to understand the strategies, the studies that have been carried out, and reaching a beneficial resolution for both sides.

“In a start-up world, I feel like you’re always selling and you’re always negotiating at some point or the other,” he notes. “It has been transformational in the way that I think about it.”

Besides his encounter with the Brick Lane shopkeeper, Arora also traces Fleek’s deeper roots back to his MBA global consulting project. He lived in Shenzhen, China, and worked for SF Express, a logistics company. This involved experience in warehouses and helping to design fulfilment systems for ecommerce marketplaces and companies.

There, he says he became “obsessed with the idea of social commerce” — or ecommerce platforms that include social and interactive shopping features. “There’s a lot of social interactions that happen between buyers and sellers [on Fleek] that I believe were inspired by my time in China,” he says, noting features such as hosting videos of the products being sold and enabling video calls between buyers and sellers.

There are things . . . that give you a cheat code to do what you’re doing better

With the company focused on expansion, Arora wants to double down on its mission to “make second hand first choice while empowering entrepreneurs on both sides of this marketplace”.

That is not without its challenges, with quality and authenticity prominent among them. The company is working on solutions such as building quality check centres in Karachi and Delhi to assess items before they are shipped, and using third-party applications, such as Legit App, to help authenticate items. The app enables workers at the check centres to send a photographs of products to experts who can advise on authenticity and share the conclusion with buyers.

The MBA is helping Arora on that road towards growth. While the best thing you can do to learn to be an entrepreneur is to “do”, he says, “what an MBA can do is provide you with that structured approach to ideation, to the cheat codes and the frameworks that you do need, and a network that you can really fall back on.”