One of the best things about building ScalePeak is the opportunity to listen to fascinating stories from gritty, creative entrepreneurs building a small business that works. There are things in there that can be beneficial to other entrepreneurs. One such is how a woman entrepreneur from Mysore runs a small, rather micro-business, selling carefully handpicked sarees to a small community she has built and delighted over the last couple of years.

Lessons from a woman entrepreneur selling sarees

The Story:

Our entrepreneur runs a modest yet flourishing single-person business, selling around 1000 sarees each month. While exhibitions contribute to 80% of her sales, a significant part of her business thrives through her savvy use of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, along with WhatsApp as a crucial channel for customer communication and sales.

Her approach to selecting sarees is meticulous and personalized. Via video calls, she carefully chooses each piece from a select group of vendors, ensuring a diverse and appealing collection. Her regular visits to Bangalore enrich her inventory further, keeping her offerings fresh and in-demand.

Be it Whatsapp or exhibition, her customers get her full attention. This coupled with her diligence and a sense for what designs customers would like, has helped her build a loyal, repeat customer base.

A regular creator of related content on Facebook and Instagram, she finds this as an important marketing channel for her customers to discover her and her products.

What’s working here:

• Her innate sense of saree designs that her customers would love
• Attention to detail and dilligence in picking the sarees from a curated list of vendors
• Providing delightful customer experience reliably delivering a great product
• Building a relevant audience on Facebook / Instagram

Challenges

There are some challenges she is fully aware of:

• Saree designs keep changing. Maintaining an up to date product catalog is a challenge.
• Maintaining and managing differential pricing to resellers and customers
• Price sensitive customers cut into her margins many times for online order considering shipping costs

Opportunities for growth

Some potential areas for growth remain untapped:

• Her manual handling of business activities limits her ability to scale.
• Lack of an online listing platform restricts access to valuable customer behavior insights.
• Leveraging technology could amplify her intuitive understanding of customer preferences, leading to more strategic business decisions.

Technology as a Catalyst:

Both known and unseen challenges can be addressed and opportunities unmissed through technology adoption.

• Using a system would make it faster and easier to create and update the product catalog as well as generate the custom PDFs required for forwarding to folks on Whatsapp or for the events

• Differential pricing management is painful to do it manually via excel. Having a software meant for that significantly lowers the pain.

• Having a website and selling on marketplaces can help expand her customer base. With an expanded customer base, there will be more margin for discounts and shipping costs.

• Having an online presence can also give her customer insights that are valuable to both her business and her vendors.

Share Your Story:

The journey of our saree seller in Mysore might resonate with your own experiences in the online business world. How have you faced and overcome your unique challenges? Whether it's about clever marketing strategies, customer relationship management, or innovative business solutions, your insights could be invaluable to fellow online entrepreneurs. Let’s share and learn from each other's experiences, helping us all grow in the diverse and dynamic arena of online selling.