We started selling hair accessories from May 2015. You can read here how we started this venture.
We only sell online with no physical shop as this venture is operating from my garage. Last year, around this time when COVID-19 lockdown was started, I was busy setting a physical shop in Ameer Nisha Market in Aligarh (Ameer Nisha is a famous ladies market in Aligarh, UP).
Our shop ran only for five days and after that the great Indian Lockdown started. We were really clueless what to do. Our online business got a huge hit. All packages in transit got cancelled and we refunded all the customers.
When lockdown opened in May, sales got a boost as more and more people go online route for buying their daily use stuff (See this article). At that time, we faced another problem, problem to get goods to sale. Our stock got finished and there was no way to go to the wholesale market to buy stock.
We decided that we have to make most of our stuff by our own means. Our target was to make at least 50% of the items we sold by December 2020. We succeeded in making 30% which is also an achievement.
In July 2020 we decided to make scrunchies. Although scrunchie is a common item and you need only fabric, elastic and a sewing machine to set the things up and running.
But, alas simple things has their own problems. In quest of making a perfect scrunchie, we done many experiments. Finally we zeroed on a final design of scrunchie and started making the scrunchies.
In December, we revamped our website and shifted to this new ecommerce system with a new zeal. So far, we are very much successful in this small venture. We completed all the targets we fixed for us and February 2021 was blockbuster month for us.
Anokhi Ada now has the largest collection of scrunchies in India (except probably marketplaces). We now have almost 400 different design and colour of scrunchies. Ninety Eight designs are already sold out and we were not able to find the fabric again to restock them.
And we are not stopping, we are adding almost new designs everyday and getting a lot of customer praises for our designs. We have very responsive customer service (although having a very small team).
Out target is at least 1000 design of scrunchies by the end of 2021. Apart from scrunchies, we also have lot of products like banana hair clips, simple clutchers, headbands etc.
In April 2021, our main focus would be on headbands and banana hair clips. May be we also start making earrings as per customer demand.
Thanks for reading this.