At Storyboard18’s Share The Spotlight event, Naiyya Saggi, group co-founder of The Good Glamm Group shared her spotlight with three other women.
Saggi shared that in each of the women, she has seen a lot of grit. “A lot of times when I’m down in the dumps and looking for inspiration, I go back to their stories or to a conversation with some of them and that really inspires me,” she said.
She added “Its not just the grit and resilience that they demonstrate. It’s the ability to switch careers. All of us have gone through similar pathways where we didn’t set out to be entrepreneurs, it just happened. We’ve gone through very tough journeys to reach where we have. It goes to show that there’s no right answer.”
The first woman Saggi nominated was Neelu Khatri, who is the co-founder and SVP – operations of Akasa Air.
Interestingly, Khatri’s first ever flight was in a MiG as an Air Force pilot.
Khatri shared how similar to Saggi’s journey, earlier on, male cadets and other personnel in the Indian Air Force would not salute her despite her uniform thinking she’s a lady and they weren’t supposed to. Soldiers then, were typically thought to be big, tall, bulky men. A woman soldier was close to unheard of.
When she left the force as Wing Commander fifteen years later, she joined KPMG for five years. She went on to become president for Honeywell Aerospace India, and finally joined Akasa Air, when the opportunity was presented to her by Vinay Dube, CEO of Akasa Air, suggesting that they wanted to create an airline and wanted her help.
The second woman Saggi shared the spotlight with was Jyoti Bharadwaj, the founder of TeaFit, an Indian beverage brand.
“If I know the things I know today about running a business, I would not do a business,” Bharadwaj said.
“I am an absolutely accidental entrepreneur,” she shared. Bharadwaj has had a great career overall. A degree from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, a good run with a couple of start-ups. However, she shared that she was trying to figure a good work-life balance with two kids to take care of simultaneously.
There were two reasons why Bharadwaj decided to venture out and build her own business. One, she wanted to give time to her kids, that was otherwise difficult. Secondly, she said that she was always concerned about the consumption story being built in India.
“You go to any Indian beverage isle and you’d see a cola, an energy drink and a fruit based beverage. The only underlying commonality is that they were all loaded with sugars, sweeteners and chemicals,” she said.
“I waited for a long time for someone to solve this but it wasn’t solved. So I decided to do it myself. If someone like me who is into real estate and e-commerce can get into beverages without knowing the first thing about manufacturing, then anybody can,” she added.
Today, TeaFit’s packaging staff at the manufacturing plant comprises entirely women, the Mumbai office too has a 90 percent women workforce.
The third woman that Saggi shared the spotlight with was Sujata Biswas, the co-founder of Suta, a fashion brand that deals mainly in sarees.
Biswas shared that when she and her sister decided to start their brand in 2016, India’s startup ecosystem wasn’t as great as it is today. They had no one they could turn to for help or advice.
She said, “When we started we didn’t have much money other than our savings. We started doing our own photoshoots. People would ask why we were modelling in our own photoshoots. I’d say that I needed to save money and this was the only chance I’d get to start something.”
Suta was started with an investment of six lakhs. Today it is a profitable and bootstrapped company that does a revenue of Rs. 74 crore annually, Saggi stated.