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Starting with 30000 to reach 1 crore in 20 months!!! How Paarijaatham helped us live our dream

We are all engineering graduates freshly passed out from college and has just joined our first jobs which gave us 20-25k a month. Sitting in the beaches of Kanyakumari during our first job vacation we decided to start something of our own, a dream which many friends usually have, the only difference....we lived the dream and still living......

Ananthram 1 Stories

Friday June 16, 2017 , 3 min Read

Sitting on the beaches of Kanyakumari one fine sunday evening the 5 of us decided that we will start something of our own. We shortlisted 3-4 business ideas and decided on one. SAREES!! and that too we decided that we will focus only on pure silk sarees. We had no clue "from where to start". We invested 30000 and got our webhosting done. www.paarijaatham.com was born. Through a friend we got a basic website done. We had no money to invest on inventory.

We travelled to Kancheepuram, met 100s of weavers and requested them to give pictures of the designs they weave so that we can display it in our website and if an order comes we will get it from the weavers and then pay them. 2 out of 100 accepted to our deal. Our idea seemed to end at the drawing board itself. Our dream looked like it will end before it actually began. We decided to tweak our idea. "To bring sarees from all states of India under a single roof". That became the plan.

We invested 5000 each and purchased 25 sarees. We hit the roads and started selling them door to door on the streets. So 9 months since our beach meeting we sold our first saree in march 2015. Our march accounts read 1500INR turnover. With our first set of 25 sarees sold we decided to buy the next set with the money. We decided not to touch the profits. We continued our corporate jobs and continued to sell on the streets during weekends and after office hours. We invested 3-4k every month from our salaries.

We then decided to put up a stall in an IT park in chennai. through the contacts gained so far, we arranged 150 sarees from kancheepuram for a day on credit and promised to return them once the stall is done. End of our first stall, our total loss was 3000INR with no profits made. That night we had a meeting at a small room in Tharamani, Chennai. We decided to continue our street to street selling. We decided to come up with a stall every month so that our brand gets known to people.

We started selling on the streets of Chennai, Bangalore and Kanyakumari. We split ourselves into pairs and took leaves fr a week from office once in two months and hit the roads to sell sarees. We kept working irrespective of the results we got. Insult and humiliation didn't hurt us instead kept our determination on track. We parallely started developing our website as well

Fast forward to 2016 september, we opened our first showroom in Kanyakumari. a 420sq ft one. Still it was ours. Our website is getting orders, we have launched our android App. Our boutique has a earned itself a name in our district. We grabbed the achiever's award for the best boutique of our district for the year 2017. We have managed to acquire the confidence of a few weavers with their weaving units for our own production of silk sarees. We hit our first one crore mark in earlier this year. We hope this is just the start of many more to come. We have planned to open a fleet of boutiques all over the country in the coming years with sarees from all states on India under a single roof.