Things I didn’t know as a 21 year old entrepreneur.

I was just graduating with a Bachelors in Fashion Design when I got accepted for a Masters programme in Brand & Communication in Milan. I had 6 months on me before I’d pack my bags again and leave to start a new chapter in my life.

After three years of crazy hours of work at Fashion School, I found myself getting bored at home during those 6 months. On a whim, along with the help of my friend and mom, I decided to start “The Postbox”. As a 21 year old designer, I felt the need to help other young artists such as me and thus began what I call, A True Rollercoaster Ride.

Looking back, here’s what I wish I knew then and eventually learnt along the way. (Remember I was very young and foolish — the best time to risk everything you’ve got). I’m not here to glamorise the role of being an entrepreneur but share my journey of how it took everything from me and yet gave me everything I have today.

1. Basics of registering a company. Yes, there are agencies to do this for you and people who can advise you but when you’re young and have to account every penny you borrow from your parents, it gets difficult to engage with external help. I remember sitting down with my Mum’s bank manager and listening to him intently as he explained the steps patiently to me. For the first time in my life, I would get a notary to authorise a “partnership deed”, I would apply for an official PAN card and oh wait, I didn’t know we needed to have a goddamn bank account for that.
2. A crash course on Operations & Logistics. It’s a freaking nightmare. I remember getting SO frustrated with all the documentation work, payment gateway approvals, integration of the same, understanding what the f*** a merchant ID is and breaking my head over barcodes for the first few months. On Day 1 we got 11 orders, all of which my mom, my neighbour and I sat down to pack. I’d be furiously typing out the packaging sheets and assigning barcodes and my mom and aunt would pack them. We had our own little assembly line. Guess how many orders we messed up?
3. The power of Word of Mouth. We were counting every rupee that would come in (days when none came) and had zero money to spend on ads. We had only one choice — to ask all our friends and family to promote it on their social media accounts. I reached out shamelessly to friends who had connections with journalists and got us interviews in Deccan Chronicle, The Hindu, India Today, you name it. People were generous. They liked what we did and more importantly, how we did it. We were sincere in our communication. We asked for help. We spoke honestly and were transparent. We were no where close to being a fancy design focused start up. We were still sorting through tonnes and cartons of hay to package 75 orders a day when Mr.Tata replied to our extremely short email asking to meet with us in Mumbai in the next 48 hours.
4. The beauty of Social Media. As a proud millennial, I’m glad I took to Instagram the way I did. I treated it as my personal account and started to share images on our page way before we actually went live with the online store. We spoke about how difficult it was to get the partnership registration, how our first notebooks vendor messed up on the quality of the pages and how excited we were to be on this journey with all of them who chose to follow us and our story. Even today there are people who come up to me randomly and say that they truly enjoyed how personal our Instagram account felt. Some of our best collaborations were born through this platform. And some great friendships too :)

I will continue to share more over a period of time but if you are someone who’s just starting out, this is for you. Keep going.