Hailing
from a business family, I naturally took my father’s legacy forward and was
successful in creating a stable business over time. Our core business - New
Product development involved highly creative and confidential work. All our
work was bound by non-disclosure agreements and protecting the intellectual
property of our clients was critical.
Due to the
sensitive nature of this industry it was never possible to actively advertise
our expertise in any conventional way. We relied heavily on word of mouth and
references in our line of work. Over the years, with hard work and dedication,
we successfully built a reputation of speed and reliability in the New Product
Design Industry and were a great hit with our clients. In 2015, an unfortunate event rattled our company.
One of our long-term primary customers was dealing with an internal problem in
their organization and an unforeseen repercussion of their internal problems
lead to a fallout between us.
We were
hugely impacted and the episode managed to wipe out almost 70% of our total
business overnight, forcing me to deal with the fact that dependency on key customers
needs to be bare minimum. The following
months were extremely challenging and I started toying with the idea of
launching our own product line. Our core business made it relatively simple to
derive from our experiences and it was logical to be able to design our own
products. I had always wanted to venture into my own product line but lacked
the motivation and time. The sudden turn of events on the professional front
now made exploring this option very viable and necessary.
The step
came with its own risks and my team rose to the occasion. Primary ideas were
plotted, research work undertaken. All this without hampering the existing workflow. Design, development and manufacturing was the easy part, the challenging unexplored
territory was - marketing and selling our products. This was something new and
we had never had the need to venture into this area in the past.
Over time,
we partnered with Amazon and started selling our products online. Amazon managed
our marketing, shipping, warehousing and customer experience needs effectively,
leaving us to focus on our core competency - Product Development. Today we have
4 successful in-house products being sold on Amazon and more in the pipeline.
We are well on our way to becoming Atmanirbhar….
As an entrepreneur
I now walk the fine line between effectively managing our core business and
focusing on our new journey towards being Atmanirbhar…
Story credit - Siddharth Ghorpade | Managing Director | Aditech Plastics Pvt. Ltd.