{"id":12445,"date":"2024-05-05T09:13:59","date_gmt":"2024-05-05T09:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/samir-kulkarni-ceo-of-showcase\/"},"modified":"2024-05-05T09:13:59","modified_gmt":"2024-05-05T09:13:59","slug":"samir-kulkarni-ceo-of-showcase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dmsretail.com\/RetailNews\/samir-kulkarni-ceo-of-showcase\/","title":{"rendered":"Samir Kulkarni, CEO of Showcase"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As a child, Samir Kulkarni was always surrounded by business with his family.<\/p>\n

It seemed only natural that the current CEO of retailer Showcase would end up running a business one day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kulkarni was born in Brampton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor\u2019s Degree in Philosophy\/French at York University then an MBA in Strategy\/Finance at Yale University.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in a business family. I was mentored by my father and my uncle almost from when I was born and actually used to go with my father to business meetings from age eight onwards. Every weekend and every holiday I would spend time with him and my uncle at the office and so my career ambition was to always join the family business which is a group of different businesses and help the family in some way. That was always the ambition,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring my undergrad, I actually was running one of the businesses full-time and really didn\u2019t have much of an undergrad experience as a student because I was really working non-stop and then went to Yale and did my graduate school and became a true student there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Samir with family 1983 \u2013 Samir (center front) at 7 years old, with mother Bakula (left), Kiran (right), and sister Sonal (center back). Samir was immersed in the family business from the beginning, learning under his father in business meetings from age 8 onwards, while Samir\u2019s mother mentored him in languages and arts. Samir\u2019s sister Sonal studied the law and today is Showcase\u2019s corporate counsel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Samir Appleby 1984 + Kids 2023 \u2013 Samir (left) attended prestigious boarding school Appleby College in Oakville ON during 1984-1993. Coming full circle, his kids Arjun (center) and Karishma (right) were accepted into and enrolled at Appleby in 2023
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Kulkarni said the family is involved in many different sectors including manufacturing, financial and tech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re a pretty diversified conglomerate but the business I\u2019m involved with, Showcase, was actually not part of the group as I was growing up. It only came available for investment as I was finishing up school. So as we were acquiring that business that\u2019s when I got involved. That\u2019s where my focus has been with the group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Showcase was founded in 1994. The Kulkarni family invested with the original founder in 1999 as Samir was finishing business school. He came back to Canada and has been driving the business forward since then.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very contrarian decision at the time because all of my classmates were going off into management consulting and the dot com boom was started then in the late 90s or going into investment banking,\u201d said Kulkarni.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy training is in finance and investment management and so on. Retail was definitely an unconventional move but what has been really interesting is to look at what used to be an old world business of retail and how really the old world and the new world have come together with technology, with social media, with pop culture. We\u2019ve infused a lot of new world technology into what we do and so it\u2019s really become a new world business in that way and the old world and the new world have sort of come together to create a really interesting business model.<\/p>\n

\u201cA few people were probably scratching their heads back in the early days, now it all makes sense and it\u2019s come together and has become a really interesting modern business.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Samir Breakfast Television 2013 \u2013 One of Samir\u2019s early television appearances, introducing Showcase\u2019s products on Breakfast Television with Dina Pugliese in December 2013.
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Samir with Showcase leadership team 2015 \u2013 Hosting the ribbon-cutting of Showcase\u2019s new head office. Leadership team Greg Synowicki (left), Samir (center left), founder of Showcase Amin Jivraj (center right), and Rob Watt.
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When the family looked at Showcase, it was a very unique business model. Not a typical retailer. It is able to identify trends and commercialize those trends immediately.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of us as a real-time trend store of whatever is hot on maybe television, on radio and these days on social media,\u201d explained Kulkarni. \u201cSo that was what was intriguing. We are selling the products that everyone wants that no one can find and they want a storefront to be able to go to buy them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what makes us different than retailers selling commodities.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Chrystia Freeland Meeting Oct 2022 \u2013 as a member of the Board of Directors of Retail Council of Canada, Samir travelled to Parliament Hill to meet with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Innovation Francois-Phillipe Champagne, and Deputy Minister of Finance Michael Sabia.
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Kulkarni said data is his passion. He looks at different data sets every day with the Showcase team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are simple sources of data. For example, going on TikTok and watching TikTok for an hour. I do that probably more than I should but I spend a lot of time on social media as a daily routine. But it\u2019s also looking at other data sets and seeing what people are searching for, what people are tweeting about. I love to go through reams and reams of data and try to help find that next big thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cData is a big part of what I do. In the old days, I used to travel a lot more. I used to travel to China, meeting with vendors, traveled to trade shows. I don\u2019t do that as much now. It\u2019s become much more of a data driven business. So I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Samir + Divya \u2013 TIFF 2023 \u2013 Samir and his wife Divya Kulkarni walk the red carpet at TIFF 2023, being long-time supporters of the festival.
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Outside of work, Kulkarni is passionate about playing billiards. In his younger years, he was a competitive player. He didn\u2019t turn pro as he got into the retail sector.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s certainly a passion of mine and it\u2019s something I spend a few minutes every day playing and it\u2019s a game I feel I understand. I\u2019m also a big squash player. I\u2019ve been playing for 40 years. I make time for squash every week,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started playing pool in high school. I remember through university I was playing 20 hours a week of pool. It was a very serious endeavour. What I like about it is that it is mathematic and controllable and it\u2019s about geometry and logic and I love those topics. That\u2019s probably why I play squash as well. It\u2019s a square box where the ball is going to bounce in a predictable way and that\u2019s why I gravitated to those sorts of controlled fun as opposed to golf which I\u2019ve also tried which is not controllable at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kulkarni described his leadership style as being all about speed and entrepreneurship, spotting the opportunity in things and pivoting very quickly based on new information.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have set up our corporate culture in that way where we try to remove bureaucracy, red tape, layers of approval and things like that. And we try to make decisions very, very quickly. So people have information at their fingertips, they\u2019re encouraged to try things, to experiment. Failure is not a problem. Failure is just a delayed success. We encourage people to roll the dice, try things so that we can learn quickly and so in terms of my leadership I try to encourage those parts of our cultures because that\u2019s really what makes Showcase work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Image: Showcase<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

His passion today which he tries to spend half his time on is Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been working on AI in a very big way for the last year and a half. It\u2019s a huge part of where I see opportunity in the retail sector and beyond,\u201d explained Kulkarni.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cReally what changed at the end of 2022 when ChatGPT came out is that it was the era of large language models which has now really taken the world by storm because it can essentially read, it can write, it can analyze, it can generate new thoughts, new words, new images, new videos. It\u2019s a completely new era of technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been experimenting with AI and we\u2019ve started to inject AI into a lot of trend technology. So one simple example of that is that we watch social media at scale. On any given day, using AI, we are watching 50,000 social media videos a day. And of course that\u2019s more than any human can watch and we\u2019re training that AI to watch it and to understand it and to categorize videos, help us identify new trends, help us identify how new trends are evolving. This is the type of thing that two or three years ago would have been impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re also using AI to develop product ideas, to generate new products, new designs, whether it\u2019s logos, whether it\u2019s art. AI is very, very helpful on that front as well. Of course, AI isn\u2019t perfect and it makes all kinds of mistakes and so it\u2019s something that needs to be developed and trained but we do see it as the future and it really is a way that retailers can get an edge over the competition by being able to adopt these new technologies and deploy them very quickly whether it\u2019s in product development, whether it\u2019s marketing or whether it\u2019s in data analysis. We see a big potential there.\u201d<\/p>\n