Operators Titans E019: $450M, 6 Brands & 4 Countries: Why Sunil Agrawal Refuses to Stop

“I feel this is bigger than dot com.”

How does a $450 million publicly traded jewelry brand build a live shopping empire that predates TikTok by nearly two decades?

Sunil Agrawal (Founder, ShopLC & VGL Group) sits down with Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case and Lomi) and Katy Mimari (CEO, Caden Lane) to pull back the curtain on 46 years of building one of the most vertically integrated businesses in the world. He started as a gemstone lapidary and grew six retail brands without ever once considering an exit.

Sunil runs a live shopping operation most DTC operators have never seen. He launches 100 new products every day. His top customers generate $20,000 in lifetime value. He fired his robots when the ROI math didn’t hold. He moved four brands to Shopify in five months because AI did most of the coding. And he still measures the business not in dollars but in meals delivered.

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Chapters
00:00:00 $450 Million & Growing
00:04:20 Launching Home Shopping
00:14:08 The Toms Shoes Moment
00:19:26 Discovering Tanzanite
00:25:20 Moving To Shopify Fast
00:29:33 Why We Fired Our Robots
00:35:07 AI Bigger Than Dot Com
00:42:34 The Viral Bracelet Craze
00:47:33 The $20K Customer
00:55:45 Raising Founder Kids
00:59:44 How Sunil Runs His Team
01:07:34 Titan 10 Rapid-Fire Questions