A makeover seems to be an annual ritual. A thrilling yet expensive and grueling ritual might I add. Last year, around the same time – we had announced a POPxo redesign – making it the place where Indian women read, watch, shop and hangout. This year, we took it a step further with #POPxoBrandNew.

Now, the process of completely overhauling a technology platform like POPxo, which is used by millions is tricky business. Especially, when you are completely revamping the tech-stack to make it a progressive web app or a PWA. Simply put, the new POPxo website will open and behave, in many ways, like an app on the mobile. Given that 90% of our traffic is via mobile phones, this is important. When Apoorv, POPxo’s VP of Engineering, came to me with his plan to fully re-write the POPxo code base to accomplish this, I was understandably skeptical: “Are you sure?” – “Will everything crash?” – “Why???!!!?”. But I was glad (and relieved) that it all went according to plan, nothing majorly crashed and it happened on time.

Alongside this – we went in for a full design revamp, we clearly don’t believe in half measures! Anirudh, our Head of Product only joined a few months ago and his first ever project was redesigning POPxo! We went back to the wire-frame stage for our product and looked at data to see how users use POPxo and how we can make it better. Data is an important function for us – it is the only source of truth. It tells us what’s working – and Manan (who heads the Data Team) likes to tell me, often, exactly what is not working! 

Most importantly, we are becoming what we have always intended to be – a truly personalised feed for our users that is useful and entertaining.

Your POPxo feed will be nothing like anybody else’s. It’ll be built around what you find interesting. If you’re shopping-obsessed like Palki, our VP of Plixxo, that’s what will show up first and if you can not get over Taimur’s cute baby photos (like Snigdha, our Sales Lead, North) or you can’t live without knowing the absolute latest in fashion (Nitya, our Assistant Editor) or what’s happening in the beauty world (Priyanka, our Assistant Editor and Sharon, our Beauty Writer) or if you’re a fitness nut (like Sanjana, our Associate Vice President of Sales), then we have you fully covered. Ruchira, POPxo’s Head of Content and Gayatri, our VP, Video’s mission in life is to keep you fully in the know and entertained.

We have added ‘widgets’ – to give you even more reasons to come back daily. Starting with a daily horoscope and ‘Gulabo’ – our very own sarcastic, sassy period tracker. I have personally LOVED creating her. Our Head of Design Rukmini and I re-did the entire look and feel at the last moment – you can imagine how much my tech team loved me then. We lost a lot of the pastel in the colour palette for what I think is a more contemporary and fresh look. I hope you love our makeover!

We have introduced Pia – “POPxo’s Interactive Assistant”. Raman (he’s on our tech team) came up with the name and the acronym and we all loved it. As a concept, Pia was the result of a two-day offsite (where we were hosted by The Westin, Sohna Road). We came up with her as the answer to a classic POPxo dilemma – how do we pull together EVERYTHING that POPxo does. And we do a lot.

We run 5 verticals (Daily, Fashion, Beauty, Wedding, and Hindi) across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, for which we create 700 stories, 120 videos, 1500 social media natives every month. Our fantastic content, design and social media team gets all this done. Plus we have a full product and tech team, sales and revenue team, HR, finance, and operations – almost 150 people. Their job description is to make our POPxo users’ lives better! (“That’s a lot of people, PG”, as Shubham, our GM Finance is fond of reminding me.)

Pia ties it all together. She is the POPxo woman and she stands for strong, smart, independent and awesome women everywhere. Pia’s your guide to all things POPxo.

We’re the one platform for (almost) everything a smart woman needs. I hope, fervently, that you all love it – even more, than we have loved putting it all together.

Our mission at POPxo is ambitious. We want to be the default digital platform for the Indian woman – where she loves spending time, shops, where she finds answers to nearly all of life’s questions and most importantly where she has fun.

Do remember to sign in to POPxo when you visit us next. You will get access to all our content and features! Many thanks for being with us on our exciting journey. Everything we do is always for you and with you. PS: As you can well imagine, we have a lot more exciting things coming up so watch this space for more!