Reviving Social Shopping: Insights from buywith Co-Founder and CEO Adi Ronenat The Lead Innovation Summit 2023

Sourabh Sharma

15/07/2023

Livestream shopping

Adi Ronen, CEO of buywith, shared insights at The Lead Innovation Summit 2023, highlighting the revival of social shopping through livestreaming. Her takeaways stress staying true to core business, learning from others, identifying market gaps, embracing disruptors, and maintaining flexibility in business plans, exemplified by her accidental entry into livestream shopping with buywith.

Key takeaways were for brands and retailers, as well as business owners.

Livestream shopping brings the love back to online shopping. Shopping should be a social experience, and traditionally has been, but online shopping is a solitary one. Livestream shopping brings the social element back, making it a successful social commerce story.
When trying to grow a business, remain true to your core business – in this case, online shopping, and how it is so different from the social shopping experience.
Observe your environment – obsessively see what people and brands are doing. You always learn from their successes (and their mistakes).
Find the gaps – sometimes they are obvious, sometimes they are not. See where there is an opportunity for something to make a difference.
Look for disruptors – a disruptor can be anything. We had COVID-19, now we have AI. It is key to see how these impact what we plan to do. Livestream shopping in the late 2010s was a disruptor and is only now being adapted by brands.
Try to predict the trajectory – but, don’t stick to your plans rigidly and see how things go based on market reactions, and factors that you cannot control! Adi Ronen started buywith by accident, noticing an opportunity in the space.

Sourabh Sharma
Head of Social Media at buywith

Sourabh Sharma is the Head of Social Media at buywith. He is a seasoned marketer having worked across startups and multinationals like L’Oreal and Unilever. He has been a judge and keynote speaker at conferences worldwide, and his works as a marketer, thought leader and lifestyle influencer have earned him interviews in Glamour Magazine, GQ, Allure Magazine, Global Cosmetics Industry (GC) Magazine, VMan and more. He is an alum of the University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, and Rotterdam School of Management.