Azra Salim, Founder and CEO of Shombhob Health, elaborates on her professional journey, how shombhob.com came to be, as well as her vision for the company.
You have almost two decades of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Tell us about your professional journey.
Since I grew up in a family involved in the healthcare industry, healthcare has always interested me. After graduating, I worked for a Consulting firm in the US where I worked with Fortune 500 companies, some of which were in the healthcare sector. After moving back to Bangladesh, I joined the family business of pharmaceutical manufacturing, where I got first-hand, in-depth experience in the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade. I have found technology interesting, and I thought of doing something in health tech. I noticed that there is no clear market leader in the e-commerce space for healthcare products. So in 2021, I launched shombhob.com, an online pharmacy and healthcare shop, to provide a much-needed quality service for the people of Dhaka city and beyond. With my team and my experience in the pharmaceutical industry, our supply chain network and customer support are very strong and reliable. My hope is that Shombhob will make a mark in Bangladesh by improving the access to medicines and healthcare products for people and pets.
Founder and CEO
Shombhob Health
What inspired you to create your own startup in 2021?
I have been interested in opening an online pharmacy for a while now, but due to the workload in the pharmaceutical business, I could never work on it. The size of the pharmaceuticals market in Bangladesh is more than $3 billion, and it is projected to double in size within the next 5 years, so there is huge potential to work in this space. After COVID-19 hit, I saw the demand for this service increase. And now, in the post-pandemic world, as people are going back into their busy work lives, traffic in cities has become worse and there is little time for getting prescriptions filled and buying the healthcare essentials. So I thought about taking up my idea again and offering an e-commerce service to make the lives of urban people easier. Shombhob is there to make it easier to take care of oneself and one’s family.
How does Shombhob Health differentiate itself from its competitors?
As I mentioned, our team’s collective experience in the pharma industry makes our supply chain and customer service very strong. Our in-house pharmacists are also very actively guiding our customer service to answer queries about medicines and health products. We are different from our competitors because we pamper our customers. We aim to build a relationship with our customers so that they call us every month for their healthcare product needs. We have mothers of sick children calling us in the middle of the night as well as hospital patients calling us for medicine sourcing requests. We treat orders with the utmost care. Monthly prescription refills for chronic care patients are a big part of our service.
Women are a major part of our clientele because we offer them the comfort of ordering products for themselves and their families, be it feminine hygiene products or medicines. We prioritize the health and wellness of our female customers, that is why during October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we have negotiated Special rates for our customers to get mammograms from our diagnostic service partners United Hospital, Medix and Popular Diagnostic Center. We are giving Discount Vouchers to all our customers who shop with us during October.
Another way we are different from competitors is that we have a pet care section also. We are importing a line of pet care products from Europe because as a pet owner, I noticed that there is no consistent supply of high-quality pet care products in Bangladesh. So we would like Shombhob to also be the one-stop solution for pet owners.
What is your vision for Shombhob Health in five years?
My vision for Shombhob in five years is that it will be a name synonymous with reliability and dependability in the healthcare products market. We want to expand to other cities outside Dhaka and be a big player in the health tech space, as well as help improve the health and wellness of the people of Bangladesh.