Q&A With Top Women in Retail Honoree Meenakshi Lala, CEO, UrbanStems

Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC) recently released its 16th annual Top Women in Retail report. The valuable resource highlights female executives who impressed our Editorial team as well as colleagues from across the industry. One such woman was Meenakshi Lala, CEO of UrbanStems. Here’s a sampling of Meenakshi’s interview featured in the report.

Women in Retail Leadership Circle: UrbanStems sits at the intersection of gifting, emotion, and digital commerce. How are you innovating across product, delivery and the customer experience to keep pace with evolving expectations for speed, personalization and convenience?
Meenakshi Lala: We think about innovation through a very human lens. Gifting is emotional, and often women are the emotional architects in their homes, workplaces and communities. Our mission is to make expressing care beautifully and conveniently as effortless as possible.

On the product side, we design for real-life gifting moments. Our teams create modern, seasonal arrangements, curated bundles, and thoughtful add-ons like cookies and wine that elevate the moment and make the gift feel truly intentional. We want every product to feel like it was designed for someone, not just purchased by someone.

On the delivery side, we’re modernizing a complex cold-chain operation across 13-plus countries to ensure freshness, speed and reliability. When someone sends a gift, they’re not just sending flowers — they’re sending their presence. We take that responsibility seriously.

And on the customer experience side, we’re investing heavily in gifting experience curation. That means helping customers discover the right sentiment, the right product, and the right occasion without the mental load. We’re building smarter reminders for birthdays and milestones, simplifying subscriptions, and creating more intuitive pathways from inspiration to checkout.

Our goal is to make the entire journey — from “I want to send something” to “That was perfect” — feel personalized, elevated and emotionally resonant. Women carry so much of the invisible work of caring for others. Gifting shouldn’t add stress, it should remove it.

At its core, our innovation is about blending emotional understanding with operational excellence so customers can send joy in a way that feels thoughtful, modern and beautifully easy.

WIRLC: Your career path has spanned multiple roles and growth stages. Looking back, where did you take the biggest professional risk, and how did that moment shape the leader you are today?
ML: My biggest professional risk was stepping off a well-established path in fashion and moving into an industry I had never worked in: floral e-commerce. It didn’t follow a traditional career trajectory, and on paper it looked like I was starting over. But I could feel that the growth I wanted lived outside my comfort zone. That decision taught me two lessons that have shaped me as a leader.

First, you grow fastest when you allow yourself to be a beginner again. As leaders, we’re often expected to have all the answers. However, there’s so much power in being able to say, “I don’t know,” “I’m unsure,” or “Teach me, I’d love to learn.” It disarms the ego, accelerates learning, and builds trust with the people around you.

Second, leadership isn’t about knowing everything; it’s about having the courage to ask better questions and step into opportunities that stretch you. Taking that risk made me a more adaptable and empathetic leader. And it’s why I encourage women, especially early in their careers, to bet on themselves sooner, to trust the skills they’ve built, and step boldly into spaces where they can grow into the fullest version of their potential.

WIRLC: What bold leadership move has had the biggest impact on your team and/or organization in the past year?
ML: Embracing a true test-and-learn culture and giving teams the space, permission and safety to experiment. In an industry where customer expectations and discovery channels are evolving quickly, we realized that breakthrough ideas don’t come from perfection — they come from iteration.

Instead of waiting for fully formed plans, I encouraged the team to bring hypotheses. Instead of long development cycles, we pushed for small tests, fast insights, and rapid refinements. The message was simple: Try it. Learn from it. Share it. Keep moving. And that shift unlocked something powerful.

One of the biggest outcomes of this mindset was the premium gifting marketplace concept, an idea that emerged because we created room for experimentation. What started as a small test around category adjacencies grew into a differentiated value proposition for UrbanStems: curated, design-led gifting bundles that expand our occasions and elevate the customer experience.

The team’s willingness to question assumptions, run micro-tests, gather data, and iterate quickly is what allowed us to build conviction and scale the idea. Without a test-and-learn culture, that marketplace vision would have remained a slide on a deck, not a strategic unlock for the business.

But the most meaningful impact wasn’t the initiative itself. It was the cultural shift behind it.
When people know they won’t be penalized for trying something new, they become braver. More creative. More curious. And that curiosity is exactly what sparked one of our most exciting growth levers.

This year reaffirmed something deeply important to me: Bold leadership isn’t about having the answers. It’s about creating the conditions for your team to discover them.