Digital Commerce · eCommerce · Omni-Channel
Abhinav Verma is a senior digital-commerce and omni-channel leader — 20+ years across APAC & ANZ in FMCG, grocery, consumer health and premium retail, spanning P&L ownership, transformation delivery and management consulting.
Currently Head of eCommerce & Customer Service at Phoon Huat Group, Singapore — a $15M multi-brand digital P&L, reporting to the CEO. Alongside the day job, a hands-on practice in applied AI: building Aura (conversational BI for FMCG) and Northstar (an honest e-commerce audit engine).
The record
Years in commerce
Largest regional P&L supported
Current digital P&L
Markets delivered in
In-house APAC leadership
Consecutive months of YoY digital growth, ~27% p.a.
Track record
2024 – Present · Head of eCommerce & Customer Service
Self-originated consulting engagement converted to CEO-direct leadership. Scaled a two-brand digital business across 10+ channels in Singapore and Malaysia; re-platformed both banners onto Shopify Plus; built an in-house LLM analytics tool for natural-language business intelligence.
Head of Growth, ASEAN D2C
Owned the ASEAN D2C brand.com P&L for Enfamil and Enfagrow — first D2C outside North America to consecutive contribution-positive results.
Omni-Channel Manager, APAC
First dedicated APAC omni owner. Nine-market roadmap on a $1B regional P&L; mPOS across 40 AU/NZ stores in 90 days; Ship-from-Store across 20 Australian stores; regional Medallia NPS program.
Omni-Channel Manager, AMA · Project Infinity
Conceived the store-fulfilled "small-market omni" model that took Southeast Asia from marketplace-only to direct-to-consumer — brand.com launched across four markets, a four-vendor RFP on ~1,300 requirements, and a regional Centre of Excellence in Kuala Lumpur.
Principal Consultant · USA + India
Three Magento builds for Sundial Brands (Unilever USA); ITC Ltd's D2C launched in 32 working days at 70% of estimated cost; CK Birla's post-GST network consolidated with ~10% logistics saved.
Career
Jul 2025 – Present · full-time; consulting May 2024 – Jun 2025
Head of eCommerce & Customer Service
Phoon Huat Group — Le Petit Depot + RedMan Shop · family-owned, private-equity-backed · Singapore + Malaysia
CEO-direct ownership of the $15M multi-brand digital P&L across brand.com and 10+ marketplaces; board-level annual planning built bottom-up to channel contribution; $250K annual savings from a customer-service operating-model redesign at >95% SLA; leads a 25+ team and three specialist agencies.
Feb 2024 – Jun 2025
Founder & Director
AV Consumer Products & Retail Partners Pte Ltd · Singapore
Independent advisory vehicle — digital transformation, e-commerce strategy and optimisation, omni-channel, CX and loyalty design, analytics and AI-based retail innovation; the entity through which the Phoon Huat mandate was originated.
Jun 2022 – Dec 2023
Head of Growth, ASEAN D2C eCommerce (brand.com P&L)
Reckitt / Mead Johnson — Consumer Health, Infant Nutrition · Singapore
Owned the $8M+ ASEAN D2C brand.com P&L (distinct from marketplace and retail trade); first COP-positive D2C outside North America; +15% repeat-purchase / CLV; Philippines market entry end-to-end; ASEAN representative on the Global Technology Council.
Mar 2021 – Jun 2022
Omni-Channel Manager — Asia Pacific (9 markets)
lululemon athletica · Singapore
First dedicated APAC omni owner — roadmap, multi-year investment case across 12 markets, mPOS and Ship-from-Store marquee programs across Australia and New Zealand, Japan warehouse transformation SME, regional Voice-of-Guest program on Medallia.
Jul 2018 – Feb 2021
Omni-Channel Manager — Asia, Middle East & Africa
Levi Strauss & Co. · Singapore
Project Infinity: SEA brand.com and store-fulfilled omni launched across four markets; regional CRM and tiered loyalty relaunch on Salesforce Marketing Cloud; owned the regional Shopee and Lazada relationships; established the KL Digital Ops Centre of Excellence.
Oct 2017 – Jul 2018
Program & Project Manager — Omni-Channel & eCommerce
ASICS Corporation · Singapore
Authored the SEA-India omni-channel blueprint; India first-market go-live in nine months with 20+ enterprise integrations across ~12 concurrent workstreams.
May 2013 – Oct 2017
Principal Consultant — Consumer Products Group
ITC Infotech · USA & India
Client-facing consulting across digital commerce, trade-promotion automation and supply-chain design for Unilever USA (Sundial Brands), Ansell Healthcare, ITC Ltd and CK Birla Group.
2003 – 2012
Early career — sales, distribution, retail finance & insurance
India & Hong Kong
Front-line operating decade across Asian Paints, Coca-Cola, GE Money, Fullerton, HDB Financial Services and Premier Insurance — the commercial grounding under everything since.
In their words
While working with him on a project in the Modern Trade channel, I was impressed by the kind of varied knowledge he can bring in for problem solving. His attention to detail and dedication for a cause is commendable.
Ankita Agarwal · Senior Client Partner, Technology APAC · Meta
Within the short span Abhinav showed his innovative skills to perform the assigned tasks. Highly organised and energetic team member… a dependable asset.
Vineet Khosla · Chief Sales Officer · Allied Blenders & Distillers
His resourcefulness and never-give up attitude makes him a person who can deliver under any circumstances.
Saunak Ghosh · Chief Marketing Officer · Zaggle
Hands-on AI
Learning AI by building it — two working systems, one design philosophy: the AI narrates, deterministic systems compute — zero invented numbers.
In active development · Working demo
Conversational business intelligence for FMCG and retail. Aura lets commercial teams interrogate their trading data in plain language: a conductor agent (Aura) orchestrates a dedicated analytics engine (Vichar) and a marketing engine (Prachar), built on Claude.
Grounded by design: the AI writes the analysis and the narrative, but every number is computed deterministically in pandas and reviewed by a conductor gate before it reaches the user — zero AI-generated numbers.
In active development, with a working demonstration running on a 4-million-row, multi-country retail dataset.
Functional · In active development
An honest e-commerce audit engine. Northstar audits any storefront and produces a measured report — site performance, structured data and search-readiness, accessibility risk — designed to serve merchants directly and agencies white-label.
The honesty floor: every number in the report traces to a real measurement — performance scans, HTML and structured-data parsing, accessibility checks. The AI narrates and prioritises what was measured; it never invents a score.
Functional today — the audit engine runs end-to-end on arbitrary storefronts, with measured-depth dimensions in build.
What I do
Grounding
MBA, Marketing & Finance — Great Lakes Institute of Management, India (2013). Magna Cum Laude; Best Outgoing Male Student in Marketing.
PGCBM — XLRI Jamshedpur (2006–2007).
Google Cloud Generative AI Leader Professional Certificate (2026).
Digital Transformation — IMD Business School (2021).
Wharton Online — Finance Fundamentals + Quantitative Modelling (2021).
Author of "AI + Me: Growing Through Change in Retail & Commerce" — an ongoing weekly LinkedIn series on applied AI in retail, e-commerce and CRM; seven articles published and counting. Read the series →
Three published CPG whitepapers on trade promotion, supply chain and route-to-market.
Shopify Plus · Salesforce Marketing Cloud · Magento · GA4 · Power BI · CleverTap · MoEngage · Qualtrics · Medallia.