Retail ReMix Stories

What does it take to build a direct-to-consumer business inside Nestlé?Noor Al Jardat, Lead for Digital Commerce (Beverages & Drinks) at Nestlé, joins Dharmendra Mehta on Retail Re Stories to discuss D2C strategy, omnichannel customer experience and how AI could reshape the way brands sell.Recorded in Abu Dhabi, this episode follows Noor’s career across software engineering, banking, fintech and FMCG. She explains why a D2C business model extends across the entire customer journey, from discovering products to doorstep delivery and customer support.The conversation explores digital transformation in FMCG through the work of building strong D2C foundations, connecting global teams with local markets, and preparing for personalisation and automation. Noor shares her perspective on creating a consistent experience across D2C, Amazon and physical retail, while giving customers a reason to buy directly.We also explore what retail brands can learn from fintech’s approach to first-party data, how customer experience supports loyalty, and why Noon and The Giving Movement stand out to her.Looking at the future of retail in 2026 and beyond, Noor discusses agent-to-agent commerce: brand AI agents interacting with customers’ shopping agents based on their interests and intent. It’s a conversation about AI in retail that connects future possibilities with the foundations businesses are building today.Along the way, she shares the belief behind this episode’s title, “Knowledge Defeats Fear,” and her advice for emerging leaders: focus on the impact you create.For anyone working in D2C, e-commerce or retail leadership in the GCC and beyond, this episode offers a perspective on building direct customer relationships inside a large organisation.About Noor AljaradatSoftware engineer by training, top of her batch. Noor Aljaradat started her career in Jordan, moved to Abu Dhabi, and spent years across tech, banking, fintech, and FMCG. Every industry, same role, the person where business, marketing, and customer experience have to agree. Now at Nestlé, leading digital commerce for Waters and Premium Beverages across MENA.About NestléFounded in 1866 in Switzerland, Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage company. Present in 186 countries, with 2,000+ brands including Nescafé, KitKat, Maggi, Milo, and Perrier, and around 270,000 employees globally. In MENA, waters and premium beverages are one of its most significant and fast-growing categories.About your host, ⁠⁠Dharmendra Mehta⁠⁠Dharmendra is the Managing Director, MEA at Fynd and a retail-tech veteran with 20+ years. From startups to global giants, he’s all about bold moves, smarter tech, and building brands that mean businessRetail Re:Mix Stories is part of Retail Re:Mix, a community of innovators transforming the retail landscape. This podcast is powered by Fynd, an AI-first unified commerce platform that has transformed retail experiences for 300+ brands.

Why does a country everyone calls "price-sensitive" actually reward brands that refuse to compete on price? In this episode of Retail Re:Mix Stories, we sit down with Niraj Jain, CEO of PT Multitrend Indo Tbk (Kanmo Group), to unpack how he's building one of Indonesia's largest retail and distribution businesses, home to Mothercare, Puma Kids, and 50+ other brands across 300+ stores nationwide. Niraj's path here wasn't obvious. A Chartered Accountant and All-India Rank Holder from a family that's been in business for generations, he spent years as CFO first at Kanmo, then at Matahari, before turning down a posting in Bangkok and eventually returning to Kanmo, this time as CEO. From there, the conversation moves straight into the operating detail: fixing stockouts by unifying inventory across stores and marketplaces, keeping one price across every channel to build customer trust, incentivizing store staff equally for online and offline fulfillment, and personally packing customer orders for a day just to find what was broken. If you're interested in Indonesia's retail and e-commerce market, D2C and distribution strategy,, this episode is for you. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Retail Re:Mix Stories for more operator-first conversations with C-suite leaders across retail, e-commerce, and commerce intelligence in the GCC and Southeast Asia.‍About the guestAbout Niraj JainNiraj Jain is the CEO of PT Multitrend Indo Tbk, part of Kanmo Group. Over the last 20 years, he's led teams across finance, commercial, supply chain, and business development, working across multinational and family-owned businesses in Indonesia, India, and Malaysia. Niraj's operator-first approach is what's driven Kanmo's retail turnaround for baby, kids, and toys, leading him to build one of Indonesia's largest omnichannel retail businesses today.About PT MULTITREND Indo Tbk (Kanmo Group) PT Multitrend Indo Tbk (MTI) is Indonesia's leading omnichannel platform in the baby and kids category, part of Kanmo Group. Founded in 2005, MTI operates 126 retail stores across brands like Mothercare, ELC, Gingersnaps, and The Children's Place, alongside a distribution network spanning over 100 cities and 45,000+ points across Indonesia. Kanmo Group itself manages 50+ brands nationwide, with a market-leading position in the kids and baby retail segment.About your host, ⁠⁠Dharmendra Mehta⁠⁠Dharmendra is the Managing Director, MEA at Fynd and a retail-tech veteran with 20+ years. From startups to global giants, he’s all about bold moves, smarter tech, and building brands that mean businessRetail Re:Mix Stories is part of Retail Re:Mix, a community of innovators transforming the retail landscape. This podcast is powered by Fynd, an AI-first unified commerce platform that has transformed retail experiences for 300+ brands.

In payments, there's no such thing as "we sold 90% and we are fine." So why do most enterprises still treat it that way?In this episode of Retail Re:Mix Stories, Dharmendra sits down with Emre Talay, co-founder and COO of Payrails, the modular payment infrastructure platform backed by Andreessen Horowitz and HV Capital. Emre has spent 15 years in payments, from building payment acceptance from scratch as a product manager in 2010, to running BKM, Turkey's local MasterCard switch system, to overseeing fintech across 70 countries at Delivery Hero, before co-founding Payrails four and a half years ago.This conversation gets into all of it. Why "accepting payments" and "payments working" are two completely different things. The real P&L cost of ignoring payment orchestration, and why the number most CFOs see is never the full picture. Why the Middle East's fragmented, country-by-country payment landscape is both a technical headache and a genuine opportunity. And why Emre is convinced AI will reshape payments completely in the next five years, but not willing to build on hype before the value is real.Emre also breaks down what it actually took to raise from top-tier investors, why building a startup feels a lot like raising a kid, and the emotional rollercoaster of the first two years of founding a company. Plus, the one thing he wishes every founder understood: if you're doing this to make money, don't.If you're a founder, a payments operator, or anyone who's ever heard "it works" and wondered if that was actually true, this one's for you.About Emre Talay Emre Talay is the co-founder and COO of Payrails. Over the last ten years, he's led teams across operations, payment acceptance, risk, and compliance, working on the merchant side of fintech globally. Emre’s merchant-first vantage point is what motivates him to help other merchants simplify the growing complexity of payments, leading him to co-found Payrails in 2022. About Payrails Payrails is a modular financial infrastructure platform spanning payment orchestration, tokenization, unified analytics, reconciliation, chargebacks, fee monitoring, and more. It helps high-growth companies turn payments from a cost centre into a growth lever, boosting revenue and margins through AI-native workflows. Trusted by brands including Puma, HelloFresh, Vinted, Preply, Flix, Careem, and inDrive. About your host, Dharmendra MehtaDharmendra is the Managing Director, MEA at Fynd and a retail-tech veteran with 20+ years. From startups to global giants, he's all about bold moves, smarter tech, and building brands that mean businessRetail Re:Mix Stories is part of Retail Re:Mix, a community of innovators transforming the retail landscape. This podcast is powered by Fynd, an AI-first unified commerce platform that has transformed retail experiences for 300+ brands.

From Monza to Sydney, Spain, Nigeria, and now Dubai. What do you learn when you've built from scratch in some of the world's most unforgiving markets?In this episode of Retail Re:Mix Stories, Dharmendra sits down with Massimiliano Spalazzi, CEO of Mumzworld, the GCC's trusted platform for mothers and young parents. Massi's story starts in Africa, where he helped build Jumia from a Lagos launch into 17 markets in four years, six business models running in parallel, and the first African internet company to list on the NYSE. Then he moved to Dubai, became a customer of a startup called Mumzworld, and eventually became its CEO.This conversation gets into all of it. How challenging markets produce better operators. Why Massi became a Mumzworld customer before he ever joined the company, and what that taught him about what parents in the GCC actually need. Why convenience is no longer a differentiator, and why trust and support are the moat worth building. How Mumzworld is thinking about community commerce and word-of-mouth as a growth engine. And where product discovery is headedMassi also breaks down why he thinks AI is a real enabler of speed, but only when your direction is already clear. Why a milestone is never the finish line, it's just the next starting point. And his one rule for winning: focus on the customer, and everything else follows. Jeff Bezos said the same thing, he says. Almost nobody actually does it.Plus, he's been a global citizen by force, still searching for free time, and thinks the whole strategy fits in one sentence - wake up, be the customer.If you're building in the GCC, scaling a vertical marketplace, or trying to figure out what comes after convenience, this one's for you.About Massimiliano SpalazziMassimiliano Spalazzi is the Group CEO of Mumzworld, the Middle East's leading e-commerce platform for mothers, babies, and children. He spent nine years at Jumia, one of the most ambitious bets in African tech, working his way from CEO of Emerging Countries across seven markets to CEO of Jumia Nigeria, before the company became the first African internet business to list on the NYSE. He then moved to Dubai, became a Mumzworld customer, and eventually became its CEO. oday, he is leading Mumzworld's evolution from an e-commerce platform into a trusted parenting ecosystem that supports families through products, services, content, and community.About MumzworldFounded in 2011, Mumzworld is the region's most trusted parenting platform, supporting families at every stage of their parenting journey. Built by entrepreneurial parents, Mumzworld was created to make parenting simpler through a seamless, reliable, and expertly curated experience designed for families across the region, Today, Mumzworld continues to evolve beyond shopping, bringing together trusted products, services, expert support, and community experiences designed around the real needs of families.About your host, Dharmendra MehtaDharmendra is the Managing Director, MEA at Fynd and a retail-tech veteran with 20+ years. From startups to global giants, he's all about bold moves, smarter tech, and building brands that mean businessRetail Re:Mix Stories is part of Retail Re:Mix, a community of innovators transforming the retail landscape. This podcast is powered by Fynd, an AI-first unified commerce platform that has transformed retail experiences for 300+ brands.

From hospitality to high-tech: what do 12 years of working in hospitality, e-commerce, electronics, teach you about building a business that truly understands its customer?In this episode of Retail Re:Mix Stories, we sit down with Sabrina Würfel, Head of Direct to Consumer (D2C) Business at Samsung Gulf Electronics who went from semi-professional figure skating to an early-2000s internship answering car repair questions for a secondhand dealer's online community, to running e-commerce for a 200-year-old German hotel, to building Samsung's D2C business from scratch in a region she'd never set foot in.This conversation dives into it all. We're talking how a towel-swan A/B test was proven wrong by a head of housekeeping, how Samsung launched its e-commerce platform across 8 countries in 8 months mid-pandemic, why "no one reads emails here" upended everything she believed about marketing in Europe, and how she balances supporting Samsung's omnichannel presence while still giving customers an added value proposition to buy direct.Sabrina also breaks down what customer loyalty really means beyond a points program, why personalization should start from your first click and not your first purchase, why data silos are the real enemy of a D2C business, and her take on AI as an "Agent Maestro", powerful, but only as good as the humans who train and direct it.Plus, she's been doing this for 12 years and still says she's learning every day. She loses more sleep over enabling her team than hitting targets, and her rule for problem-solving is simple: don't bring her a problem without three solutions.If you're building D2C in the GCC, scaling e-commerce inside a big organization, or just want to understand how to lead through constant change, this one's for you.About Sabrina Würfel:Sabrina Würfel is a regional digital commerce and product leader with over 12 years of experience across MENA and Europe, including 7+ years in senior leadership. She is the head of Direct to Consumer Business for Samsung Gulf Electronics and has experience across 13 markets in the Middle East and North Africa, owning regional P&L, platform strategy, localisation, payments, and customer experience. Her work sits at the intersection of commerce, product, and platforms, scaling ecosystems, launching regional apps, and turning global capabilities into commercially successful regional execution.About your host, Dharmendra MehtaDharmendra is the Managing Director, MEA at Fynd and a retail-tech veteran with 20+ years. From startups to global giants, he's all about bold moves, smarter tech, and building brands that mean business.Retail Re:Mix Stories is part of Retail Re:Mix, a community of innovators transforming the retail landscape.This podcast is powered by Fynd, an AI-first unified commerce platform that has transformed retail experiences for 300+ brands.