Hi Everyone,
Welcome to my blog!
Nowadays, starting a business is very easy. When we start, we can do marketing quickly and effectively. Why? Because we understand how to create branding and marketing strategies.
But let’s think about how people used to do business back in the year 2000 or earlier.
I started using WhatsApp and Facebook around 2010 or 2011. But imagine someone starting their own business before all of this!
Let me tell you a story about a woman who started a tailoring business—my mom. We now call it fashion designing. I want to share how it all started.
My mom didn’t know how to stitch full clothes at first, but she did know embroidery. Back then, when a woman tried to do something, her mother-in-law or society would often say, “You have small kids, why are you doing this?” But my mom’s story is one of passion and inspiration.
She knew how to do embroidery, attach sari falls, stitch blouse hooks, and other small tailoring work. One day, she approached a local aunty who was already doing this kind of work. She simply asked, “Do you have any work I can help with?” The aunty said yes and began training her.
Now here’s something interesting—my mom only studied up to SSLC (10th standard), but she is very sharp. I think I got my sharpness from her! While picking me and my brother up from school, she used to talk to other parents and say, “I’m good at Hindi and Math, I can teach tuition.” Just like that, she got students by offering one week of free demo classes. That’s what we now call smart marketing!
So here are the steps of how she built her business:
Step 1: Tuition
She knew how to do marketing, promote herself, and offer demos. This brought in her first students.
Step 2: Tailoring Skill
She wanted to learn proper tailoring. When she asked her family for support, they said, “Why do double work? Take care of your kids and home.” But she had a strong passion. Her sister gave her tailoring books, and she studied by herself without a teacher.
She practiced by hand-stitching clothes for my dolls. I was so happy! My dad saw this and thought it was a good time-pass, so he bought her a sewing machine. She was overjoyed. She stitched my first chudidar (salwar kameez), and it was beautiful.
At first, she stitched clothes for people for free. When she later asked for payment, some said it wasn’t good enough. But she didn’t stop.
She continued improving. She started getting cloth orders from her tuition contacts. Then she tied up with three local shop owners and hired three helpers to work on blouse stitching and other tailoring services.
Eventually, she had many loyal customers and started her own saree and dress business. All my education, including my MCAdegree, was funded by my mom’s hard work.
Whatever I am today is because of her.
Thanks to her, I always had new clothes, and she eventually became a well-known fashion designer in our area. She could look at any design and recreate it perfectly.
Later, as she got older, she had eye surgery, and in 2017, we even sold some of her stitched items on Amazon and Flipkart. But we had to stop because we didn’t have GST registration.
Still, everything I know about business today, I learned from watching my mom.