Snapdeal's old employees are coming back as company tries to regain its lost glory

• Founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal have brought back the e-commerce company from the (almost) dead.
• Snapdeal has seen over 50 employees coming back to rejoin the company.
• The e-commerce company which once didn’t have money to survive a month, today has a big new office with 750 employees.

In one end of Gurugram, not surrounded by the usual high rise buildings and hustle bustle, in one of the otherwise alone tall buildings, lies Snapdeal’s new office. A swanky new space with the Snapdeal signature red colour almost everywhere, 750 employees find their seats in an open office.

The founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal ditched cabins cabins to sit right amidst their employees.

While this is the saga of every startup today, for Snapdeal, it is the story of resurgence.

In 2017, Snapdeal, which was actually one of the early e-commerce players in the country, was caught in the grip of increased competition from Amazon and Flipkart. The company lost a huge chunk of its market share and posted a net loss of ₹46.47 billion in 2016-17.

Reports say, Snapdeal was barely left with any money to survive, as they struggled to merge with Flipkart.

“The uncertainty was costing Snapdeal money, morale, momentum and more. It was clear to us that we were hurtling towards a full-blown crisis,” Bahl wrote in a LinkedIn blog post.

Now, they want a do-over as they launched Snapdeal 2.0 in July 2017. “Snapdeal 2.0 is about going back to the energy and drive of a start-up culture. Our new office embodies all that - it is home to a nimble and high-energy team,” said an official spokesperson.

About 50 employees have returned to Snapdeal in the last one year, which includes one of its chief architects who had gone on to join a foodtech unicorn as the CTO. The company says that the average tenure of an employee in the company is now over 4 years and even has employees who have celebrated a decade with Snapdeal.

“This also means that a large part of the company has seen a big splashy headline phase and have seen the tough period of the company and then stuck together and seen how the company came out of that phase. That kind of collective wisdom and that type of galvanisation of culture money can't buy,” said the spokesperson.