Today marks the third Women’s Entrepreneurship day — a special day when the struggles and success of women entrepreneurs are recognised, debated and celebrated. Gone are the days when only men called the shots in the field of business. With the world changing for good, more talented women are turning business tycoons across the globe and the city of Chennai is no exception to it. DC speaks to few such women who have come up with start-ups in the last one year.
The founder of food service, A Salad Company, Sreevarshini, opens up about her journey of starting the company which serves people with healthy salads.
“About a year ago, when I realised that I was putting on weight and was scouting for restaurants that could deliver healthy salads every day, I found no such options in the city. That’s when I decided to start one myself,” Sreevarshini starts.
And that’s how A Salad Company took birth. Yet, it was not an easy and rosy road for her to establish her brainchild — “It took around four to six months of visiting doctors and dieticians to curate recipes, and many rigorous trials, before I set up the company. We serve up food at its healthiest — no processed flours, no MSG, no deep frying. And, with a young daughter, running a company all by myself can be a bit challenging. But there’s a lot of excitement in running your own company. There have been days when I had to deliver the food myself! Everything is a learning experience. I feel so proud when my daughter tells her friends that her mum runs a company. I’m hoping to expand to other areas in Chennai and other cities too.”
Saloni Shah and Shweta Raman, the co-founders of gift box curators The Style Salad, have a similar story to tell — “Both of us have been friends from school and we always knew we wanted to do something in fashion together. We had the idea of experimenting with some of the undiscovered products in lifestyle, gourmet food, home decor and presenting it as a gift box. There are so many festivals in India, and we’re always looking for gifts. So, we wanted The Style Salad to be a platform to curate gift boxes and be a marketplace for some of the finest handpicked products. There are times when running a company as two women throws challenges — most of the interactions we have, as a part of the company, are with men, and sometimes they tend to take advantage of the fact that we’re women — which then requires us to be pushy. But people, in general, have been highly appreciative of everything we’re doing. We’re working on pan-India deliveries and have been receiving requests for overseas deliveries too.
Across the contry, this can be seen as a time when women are stepping up and going to any extent to make their mark in what they want to do.”
