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How a daughter scaled her mother’s element-time enterprise to a multi-crore one

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How a daughter scaled her mother’s element-time enterprise to a multi-crore one

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The worldwide financial downturn of 2009 is thought to be the worst of the four submit-battle recessions by way of ways. Sulagna Ghosh, aka Shuli, turned into finishing her undergraduate studies in English literature at the prestigious Ivy League Institute of Columbia University in New York. Times had been wrong. The international economic system was in the doldrums. Organizations have been aggressively downsizing.

mother’s element-time

Shuli decided it’d be high-quality to return home to Kolkata. Technically and legally, she should have stayed back, given that she was born inside the US (and hence a naturalized US citizen) while her mom, Shanta Ghosh, was pursuing a grasp’s diploma at the University of Pennsylvania.

Shuli was raised in Kolkata and had attended faculty inside the town. On returning, her purpose became to transform her mother’s component-time business into a complete-fledged one.

Shuli’s mother, Shanta Ghosh, was an architect who ran her engineering company. But she had been continuously inclined toward the humanities, ceramics, and pottery.

This passion prompted her to open Confetti with her now overdue potter friend, Prabhas Sen, in the early 90s. The two installations are a small workshop in Santiniketan to educate and offer employment to nearby artisans. They additionally started to retail from the identical workshop.

Shuli had spent quite a little time on the workshop throughout her vacations, also trying her hand at pottery. When she returned to India, she determined to pay attention to the business with a resolve to grow.

Shantiniketan is a small city, one hundred sixty-five km from Kolkata, home to the Viswa Bharati University, installed using Rabindranath Tagore.

“While we would promote from a small keep within our workshop, there was no showroom. We might get a few large orders from people traveling the metropolis or from accommodations now and again. But it changed into now not regular or sustainable. That is while we determined to open a store inside the town to tap into a bigger purchaser base,” she provides.

The mom-daughter opened their first shop, Sienna, in a Kolkata mall in 2010. Sienna is the brand call for Confetti’s shops. While the shop did nicely in the initial two years, the enterprise began to drop. Shuli explains, “Our store-bought pottery and handicrafts. Being in a mall changed into not a terrific concept. Our positioning was incorrect, and the lease became excessive.”

Food and artwork

The 31-year-old entrepreneur also decided to install a small café in the shop to exhibit pottery. The food has become so famous that the cafe has taken up 1/2 the store space over the years.

“My mother is a first-rate prepare dinner. She could make salads and soups at home all the time. We decided to apply her recipes to the cafe; they became a large hit with our customers. We began on a small scale with tea, coffee, homemade food, and cakes and moved directly to bread and cheese using Mum’s recipes,” Shuli says. The cafe can currently seat 25 human beings and is a famous venue for live track events, e-book clubs, and product launches, ensuring consistent sales influx.

Eula Boone

I have written professionally since 2010 and have been an investor since 2015. My finance blog, economydiva.com, is one of the most visited blogs in the world, with more than 3 million readers a month. I love sharing what I know about investing, saving, and managing money and providing practical tips on how to be a smart and savvy money manager.

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