Feb 16, 2021
Our “Humans of Lazada” series takes a look at the professional and personal lives of the more than 8,000 people who work at Lazada. Click here for more stories from this series.
“I have three babies – my 2.5-year-old twins and the fast-moving consumer goods category at Lazada. I joined the company in March 2012. This was before we launched the Lazada site. No one knew what Lazada was, what it did, or what eCommerce was about. We only had around 60 people working in a small office at Copac Square Building in Ho Chi Minh City. We did most things manually, including onboarding new brands, which involved entering the information of signed contracts into the system bit by bit, as well as all our reports and follow-up on orders. Everyone from our CEO at the time to an associate like me rolled up their sleeves to get things done. We still do, but now we have about 400 more people doing that and, of course, the technology to help. During my early days at Lazada, our monthly revenue target was the equivalent of what we get on a daily basis today.
Together with my supervisor at the time, we built the FMCG category from scratch. It was only in 2014 that I started to have teammates. It was like raising a child – one has to be patient. There were days when the child tried to walk, but couldn’t and fell. Then you find ways to encourage the child, bring out the child’s strengths and feel proud when he or she is finally running. That’s how I feel each day watching the category grow, especially the mother and baby segment, which has grown more than 30 times from when we began. Being a mother to two young boys helped me nurture a team at work. I hear my team out and find solutions to any challenges that we may face. Apparently, I have earned a nickname here. People call me ‘mum.’ I think it was always meant to be my calling in life – at home and at work.”
This profile was compiled by Bao Uyen Bui from the Lazada PR team in Vietnam.