Medicine Shoppe offers access to low-cost, high-quality health care and medicines.
December 2006: It was an incredible experience being at the opening of the first Sanjeevani store last Tuesday. The store and clinic looked wonderful (clean and simple), felt nice and cool in the warm Mumbai afternoon, the Vision Shoppe had a long line for testing (I bought my first pair of prescription glasses after being tested as mildly myopic), and the line for the public clinic spilled out into the streets. I have also never seen Viraj as excited—he was just giddy about the possibilities that this new format holds for serving the poor. It also didn’t hurt that the Director of International Operations from Medicine Shoppe in the US was there at the launch. They were one of many partners that had cautioned Viraj about trying to enter the poor and rural markets, but seemed to be pleased with the launch yesterday.
It was also very gratifying to see the kind of impact that Acumen Fund Fellow Nadaa Taiyab had already had on Medicine Shoppe. In two short weeks since landing in Mumbai, Nadaa had become a full member of their team, conducted a community marketing study around the first store, scouted out the locations for two more sites in the outskirts of Mumbai, and was heavily involved in the patient outreach into the slum community. As Viraj put it, “She pulled the rest of my team into the slums. No one thought this North American would dare go into the slums, but instead, she was the one leading my guys right into the middle of the shanties to find out what kind of medical care the poor needed.”
This, I believe, is what Jacqueline means when she talks about moral imagination — not only the empathy for the poor as a consumer (which Nadaa displayed at the launch by taking and sharing many digital photos with the children in line to see the pediatrician), but also the ability to challenge the management team of this company to look at things differently. So, a big congrats to the entire Medicine Shoppe team for a job well done. They plan to open four new stores in the next month or so, and Viraj is already talking about wanting to raise more capital for additional stores sooner rather than later… very exciting.
P.S. For those watching on Google Earth, the store is at: N 19 12.793 E 072 49.263 (actually, just across the street, on the west side of the main drag through Chowpak Village in Kandavali, Mumbai). If you head just a bit south on Google Earth, you can actually see the shanty town on the edge of the water that Nadaa and the team targeted.