How Sabena Suri Built a Multi-Million Dollar E-Commerce Business 📈

An Interview with Sabena Suri, co-founder of BOXFOX, on how to build brands, scale revenue, and find success.

GM everyone! Hope you’re having a lovely morning. I just ran 5 miles through Cental Park so I am feeling good. Follow me on Strava here.

Today, I’m speaking with a multifaceted talent with experience bootstrapping a multimillion dollar startup, and now helping other brands reach the same heights.

Sabena

Suri is the co-founder of BOXFOX, a personalized gift box service she started with just $5,000 before growing it into a multi-million dollar business.

Now she is a brand advisor, helping launch, build, and scale brands across industries, from consumer, CPG, to wellness. She’s an expert at business and brand strategy, partnerships, merchandising / curation, and hiring and scaling teams.

We discussed—

• Her professional background

• How to scale a startup

• What is curation-as-a-service?

• How BOXFOX found success

• Mistakes brands make with GTM strategy

• Career advice for those wanting to follow in her footsteps

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✨ MY INTERVIEW WITH SABENA SURI ✨

Jake Bell: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your professional background thus far? 

Sabena Suri: Yes! I currently live in SF - originally from the SF Bay Area but spent 8 years in LA after USC. Right now, I'm consulting for brands who want to unlock revenue in unexpected ways. But my background has always been in building brands that break through culture. I worked in advertising right out of college (at Ogilvy & Deutsch) and then went on to start BOXFOX with 2 cofounders and $5k of our own money. We saw a whitespace for highly personalized, curated gifting -- and it turns out we were onto something. In 8 years, we bootstrapped the business to over $11MM in with $0 in outside capital, serving hundreds of thousands of customers on the B2C side and launching a sizable B2B corporate business for companies like Nike, Netflix, and Meta. In 2021, I took a step back from the day-to-day and went on to lead Operations at DEUX and then Brand Partnerships at dropshipping marketplace Canal. This all brought me to consulting -- which I'm loving! It's fun to leverage everything I've learned in new ways; every brand is so different.

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