Success stories of home-grown entrepreneurs rising above competition, and other top picks of the week
SMBStory began the new year with a bang with stories on entrepreneurs who are taking their businesses to new heights, despite stiff competition in the market.
Starting a business is relatively easy, but the real challenge is sustaining it through ups and downs and emerging stronger.
SMBStory began the new year with stories of homegrown entrepreneurs, who are not just building successful businesses but are also rising above stiff competition from other players in the market and growing with each passing year.
These are the businesses that SMBStory covered in the first week of 2023.
Tulsi Tea
Haresh Kathrotiya was a teenager when his father, Gordhanbhai Kathrotiya, faced a medical emergency. Haresh had to quit his studies to join his father’s provision store business in Chalala, a small town in Amreli district of Gujarat.
Apart from regular household products, Gordhanbhai also sold loose tea at the provision store, which was sourced from Rajkot and Amreli.
“While our business was small, it made a significant impact on our customers because of the quality of tea. Our tea was loved by everyone in the town,” Haresh tells SMBStory.
Gradually, as the demand and the income from the tea business grew, Gordhanbhai tried to upscale the packaging and increase the business penetration to Amreli district and beyond. However, after he fell ill, Haresh took over the reins of the business.
Haresh says he never wanted to work in his father’s setup and wanted to move to a big city and do something bigger.
“I did not want to work in the provision store, but move to Ahmedabad or some other big city of Gujarat and do something else. But family circumstances didn’t allow. When I saw that nothing was in my favour, I put my focus on how we could scale the existing business. I knew that tea was our strong product, and that’s when I got the idea to enter the retail business in an organised way,” Haresh recalls.
More than 30 years on, —under the company GM Tea Packers Pvt Ltd—which was started as a small stint by Haresh, is now the second-largest tea brand in Gujarat, with a turnover of Rs 185.42 crore. Haresh renamed the brand as Tulsi Tea after he took over his father's business.
On how he grew the business from a provision store to a tea brand, Haresh says, “Dhande ka junoon (business passion)”.
The Shoshaa Show
Heena Bajaj Rustagi took a break from her career in advertising when her daughter was born in 2015. But soon, Heena—who had always been a financially independent woman—realised she needed to start working again.
She started out as a reseller of jewellery, running a business via Facebook and WhatsApp. Then she spent four years trying to understand the jewellery market better. Finally, she found her true calling in Old Delhi's alleyways, home to shops selling Kundan jewellery.
“I saw lanes full of traditional Kundan jewellery. They looked beautiful but were very heavy," Heena tells SMBStory. So, she decided to give traditional Kundan jewellery a modern twist and thus was born Shoshaa,
a handcrafted jewellery brand, in 2019.
The brand was started with an investment of Rs 3.5 lakh on the ecommerce platform . The founder and CEO of Shoshaa says the brand aims to give traditional Kundan jewellery a modern look, targeting women who want to wear different kinds of jewellery.
Today, the Noida-based brand, which is expanding and adding newer categories, has a turnover of Rs 4 crore. “We hope to end this fiscal year with a 200% growth,” says Heena.
Other top picks of the week:
Profits to increase for MSMEs
About 96% of Indian MSMEs expect profits to rise in 2023, according to a study by NeoGrowth Credit. The MSME Business Confidence Study covering over 25 cities and nearly 70 business segments revealed that three out of four MSMEs who participated are confident of economic growth in 2023.
According to the study, 75% of MSMEs expect consumer demand to surge, and 80% of women MSMEs are optimistic about India’s economic growth.
“It is heartening that MSMEs are confident about their growth, profitability, and other business indicators. We believe that the strong digital ecosystem in India will be a catalyst for MSME lending in the coming year,” said Arun Nayyar, CEO and Managing Director of NeoGrowth, an MSME-focused digital lender.
“MSMEs are capitalising on new credit options to build and scale their businesses easily, unimpeded by traditional methods of credit underwriting,” he said.
According to the report, only 5% of MSMEs were apprehensive about economic growth in 2023. In these uncertain times, optimism among MSMEs, India's economic backbone, is a positive indication, the report said.
Edited by Swetha Kannan