Road Full Of Excitement And Challenges

It’s been a little over 1.5 years ever since we started our journey with home decor. I can still vividly remember how excited we were when we posted a picture of a sample curtain. That got us the first order, we pretty much had to purchase everything on retail. Not to mention the unlimited challenges we faced after that.

Of course, we never had the even the closest idea that we would be soon honoring requests of hundreds of buyers.

With barely managing to complete college and struggling to find a career path, step in home decor was a larger risk and a leap of faith. As they say, in the leap of faith; faith comes first.

We didn’t hesitate to dive right into it. Faced a gazillion challenges, from working to find the sources to buy the raw material and putting together a team to help us produce the large demands.

One of the things that we were clear was not to ignore our social responsibility and ensure that we contribute to a better world, most importantly our nation.

That pushed us to look for resources who would benefit from us and we’d do the same. So, we reached out to folks in our neighborhood, to see if there are people with skills that are interested.

To our surprise, we found housewives interested in gaining financial independence and stand shoulder to shoulder with men. These women have been a part of our small family ever since. We are highly grateful for their efforts, if someone deserves the credit for our success – it’ll be them.

Our First Milestone – Excitement

With the lack of business knowledge, we faced some grave challenges. Of course, we weren’t prepared for them. However, we constantly strove to resolve the issues and tackled one thing at a time.

We reached our first milestone when we successfully crossed one year and thousands of Instagram followers. When we think about how we got there, we are often speechless and left with tears in our eyes. That’s because no matter how difficult things got for us, our customers stood by us at every turn.

To be honest, we have had days when we thought about quitting and one thing that kept us going was the love that we got from our customers. The real achievement in the last 1.5 years is the love that we retained from our beloved customers.

Mere words will never be able to define the sense of gratitude and appreciation that we have for them.

From a single curtain to over 40 products in our catalog, that’s been some rough road full of challenges.

Lockdown – The Biggest Challenge

We were just picking off from celebrating our first anniversary on Dec 16th, 2020, in a couple of months we along with the rest of the world were struck with Covid19.

We had to cease 100% of production that brought down our cash inflow significantly. Even then our customers trusted us so much that they continued to place orders. Not knowing when the delivery would happen.

We also acknowledge the fact that some customers felt cheated because we couldn’t deliver the products to them for a long time. I am definitely of the sentiment that we failed to deliver the product in a fairly decent timeframe.

What happened in the background was a completely different story. Delhi was soon becoming a hotspot of the Coronavirus cases. With that, plenty of markets where we sourced our raw materials were either closed or operated with limited stock.

To top it off, the workforce that went back home during this did not return seeing how the situation was worsening in our city. I couldn’t blame them for making such a decision. In their shoes, I would have probably done the same.

However, we almost felt crippled during this time, and constantly facing our customers losing that faith in us was heartbreaking.

Besides the women that work for us, the other part of the team that manages these operations from production to fulfillment did not give up. They owned the problem, raised the bar, and have worked 7 days a week without a day off.

I am amazed at what we as humans can do. All I have is the utmost respect and gratitude for them.

What’s Next?

Our goal for this year was to set up our business online with a fully functioning website. We made that possible, even with all the craziness that was going on.

We are constantly working on it and trying to improve every little bit each day. It’s under a constant check to see that none of the customers face any challenges in accessing it and hopefully it answers all their questions about the product.

Along with that, we have released many new products which have been equally appraised by everyone. Our aim is to become a one-stop-shop for all your home decoration needs.

Mission

Our country has given a lot, now we think that it’s time for us to give back. We want to bring India together and promote Indian business industries. Our plan is to have production units set up all over the country. We want to be able to provide employment to as many people as possible.

We are currently a team of 30 people with over 18 housewives who earn their livelihoods with us. Another dream is to launch training centers for youngsters to help them develop handicraft and art related skills.

We want to focus on women empowerment and provide them a safe and secure workplace where they feel at home.

In Conclusion

We want to conclude by expressing our heartfelt gratitude to every single person that has supported us. This wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of every single one of you. The encouragement that we have received over the course of time has been phenomenal and that helps us deal with all the challenges we come across.

The paradigm shift in how things turned out were dependent on your love and appreciation. We hope to get better and better with our service delivery and continue to keep the quality our top priority.

We once again thank your for kindness, patience and immense support.

The HippieSaaz