I build systems at the intersection of technology, commerce and customer experience.
Leading technology and building systems at Mokobara — the internal tools, customer data, automation and AI that sit underneath a growing D2C brand. Exploring how technology, data and AI turn businesses into better experiences.
The visible Mokobara experience — a bag, a store, a checkout — is the tip of a much larger technology system. This is the part of it I work on.
The Shopify Plus storefront, expansion stores, B2B, checkout logic and a custom POS — so the website and 36 stores behave like one business.
Segmentation, lifecycle, membership and first-party data. Where the technology work started, and what it still answers to.
ShopifyQL, GA4, ads and marketplace data pulled into tools that trigger an action — not decks.
Flow workflows, cron jobs, serverless endpoints and self-updating apps that remove the repetitive.
Claude Code in the loop for every internal tool; the storefront made legible to the AI shopping agents that are starting to arrive.
A 1.7 mm tracker on both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub. Physical products that emit events into a customer's phone.
24 entries in the build log so far — analytics apps, a custom POS, a physical tracker, storefront systems. Four of them below.
A gated, 500-piece limited-edition drop with its own access-code system.
A limited drop needed to feel limited: a product page only the right people could open, a way to ask for access, and a fully automated path from request to code — without anyone in the loop.
Phone-first Shopify analytics for the team, on Mac, Android, iPhone and web.
The questions the team asks all day — conversion, online vs retail sales, marketing, returns — were buried in an admin built for desktops. Nobody opens the admin on the way to a store.
A custom point-of-sale platform that makes stores and website one channel.
Retail stores and the website were two channels with two views of the customer. True omnichannel needs one.
A 1.7 mm tracker that works with both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub.
Lost luggage is the worst moment in a travel brand's customer journey. After Mokobara joined Google's Find Hub launch, the brand needed a product that made every bag findable — on both phone ecosystems.
Mokobara sells design-led travel gear. Behind the bag is commerce, customer data, retail, marketplaces, automation, analytics and a growing set of internal tools. Nikhil's work sits across all of it — leading tech, CRM and catalogue.
Every part of the system above exists to make one customer’s journey better — from the first ad to the belt where their bag comes out. The technology is only interesting because of what it does to that journey.
Nikhil's first physical product: a 1.7 mm, IP68 tracker that works with Apple Find My and Google Find Hub. It followed Mokobara being named — with July — as one of the first two luggage brands in Google's Find Hub launch.
Every step moved closer to the machinery that connects a business with its customers. Twelve years, four chapters, one direction.
Leading Mokobara's tech, CRM and catalogue.
Customer retention, technology solutions, payments and omnichannel commerce. Seamless website experiences, problem-solving tech, the gift-card business, unified payment platforms.
Leading CRM and the front end of the Shopify-based website.
Building the CRM ecosystem from scratch.
Mokobara is a design-led luggage and travel brand founded in Bengaluru in 2020 — online-first, now 36 stores across India and Dubai on a Shopify Plus stack. Nikhil first saw the bags at Bengaluru airport around New Year 2022 as a customer, and joined a few months later to build its CRM.
The remit widened every year: CRM, then the storefront front end, then technology, payments and omnichannel commerce, then a physical product. The tools he wanted did not exist, so he started building them — analytics apps, dashboards, storefront systems, a custom POS with a partner team, and a tracker that ships in a box.
That a growing brand's real product is the system behind it. That the fastest way to a better customer experience is usually to build the missing piece yourself. And that AI changes who gets to build.
Leading the loyalty programme for Sephora India.
Planning and executing Gap India's retail marketing, and leading its loyalty programme.
Arvind Fashions runs some of the biggest international fashion brands in India. Nikhil spent five years on GAP — retail marketing first, then launching and running the brand's loyalty programme — before leading CRM for Sephora India.
This is where marketing turned into customer data. A loyalty programme is a system: enrolment, tiers, triggers, repeat purchase. Running one for a global brand in India taught him to think in cohorts and lifecycles rather than campaigns.
That retention is a design problem. A colleague's recommendation from this era describes an "incredibly competitive loyalty program for Gap" that kept supplying repeat business — the pattern he would rebuild at Mokobara.
Max is one of India's largest value-fashion retailers. Nikhil started here as an intern during his MBA and came back full time — his first exposure to marketing at retail scale.
From coursework to the floor: campaigns, stores, and the gap between what a brand says and what a customer does.
That customers vote with their feet, and that the interesting work starts where marketing meets data.
A commerce degree in Odisha, then a two-year business programme in Bengaluru with a marketing MBA alongside it.
Bengaluru happened. He has not left.
Accounting first, marketing second. The order turned out to matter: every system he has built since is, underneath, a ledger.
“Nikhil successfully launched and implemented an incredibly competitive loyalty program for Gap and continued to lead CRM for it while supplying repeat business for the brand in India.”
“A professional who gets his hands dirty with everything. Extremely detail oriented, and a sharp observer — although he's a man of few words, they're always valuable.”
CRM is not a chapter Nikhil closed when the headline changed to Tech. It is the reason the technology exists, and the test every system has to pass.
Numbers are from Epsilon’s and Shopify’s published case studies on Mokobara, both of which quote Nikhil. Nothing here is internal data.
Not quotes. Working principles — the ones that decide what gets built and what does not.
When an off-the-shelf tool almost solves the problem, the gap is the problem. Understand it properly, then build exactly what is needed — usually smaller and faster than the thing you would have bought.
Every system worth building traces back to a customer moment: a faster page, a more relevant message, a bag that can be found. If it does not change an experience, it is overhead.
A feature solves today's ticket. A system solves the category of tickets. Think in flows, data and interfaces, and the features fall out of it.
If a person does the same thing on the same schedule, it is a cron job waiting to happen. Software and AI should absorb the boring so people can do the judgement.
A dashboard nobody acts on is decoration. Data earns its place when it drives a decision, triggers an action, or shapes an experience — preferably without a human in the loop.
Version 1 on a phone this week beats a perfect spec next quarter. Real usage is the only reliable roadmap.
Six categories. Everything listed is something that runs in a tool on this site or in a public Mokobara system.
Not a blog. Notes from building — AI in commerce, customer systems, internal tools, what changed and why.
Why a growing brand ends up with a dozen small apps, and why that is healthier than one big platform.
A small share of traffic today, a large one soon. The work is making the store legible to a machine that wants to buy on someone's behalf.
Notes from shipping my first physical product, and what a Bluetooth tracker taught me about customer experience.
Nikhil is the conversational version of Nikhilendra Pratap Singh Deo. He is quiet in rooms and specific in writing, would rather show a working prototype than a deck, and treats a customer complaint as a bug report. Bengaluru since 2013.
Arrived for business school in 2013 and stayed. Still the city where he first saw a Mokobara bag, at the airport, before he worked there.
Long car trips are the hobby. Documenting them became an app — Falcon Trip — with GPS routes, fuel stops, a lifetime map and a Wrapped-style story at the end.
Runs a Mac, an Android phone and an iPhone, and builds for all three. Partly curiosity, partly because the team does too.
Uses Claude Code the way a previous generation used Stack Overflow, except it ships. Most of the tools on this site were written in that loop.
Deep enough that a Shopify app's placeholder URL became a sarcastic SKYNET terminal with T-1000 trivia. It is still live.
Notices when service breaks and says so. The same instinct, pointed inward, is why the post-purchase experience gets as much attention as the checkout.