Startup Mantras Podcast – When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 2

In the last episode I shared the stories of not just brave but intelligent entrepreneurs who in spite of all the fears inside them related to the pandemic wiping away their businesses, decided to take the pivot and convert the challenge into opportunity. They were the embodiment of the quote – “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”.

In this fresh episode, I come to you with the stories of 2 other such Startups who were like you. Either were just about to start off or had just started off or were desperately seeking funds from VCs to convert their visions to reality. Some of the Startup Founders had just quit their jobs to make this new beginning. They did not turn around and go back on seeing the tide. They put on their armours, sharpened their weapons (their brains) and went full on to face the tide.

The first story today is of Homescape which was launched by Bengaluru-based co-working space Workshaala, which in turn was founded by Manoj Khandelwal in 2013.

Coworking spaces, particularly, have been hit hard during the pandemic. With social distancing and work from home becoming the norm, the future of coworking spaces remains uncertain, at least till the wave of the pandemic fades away.

The same happened with Workshaala. As most people started working from home due to the coronavirus, the company started losing revenue by the day. They were planning to expand to Hyderabad, Chennai, and Gurugram, but all those plans came to a halt when the lockdown was announced in March. Subsequently, they started getting a lot of queries from internal customers about how people were having difficulty in setting up offices at home.

Manoj did not lose heart in spite of the setback. He set his innovation mode on and pivoted to come up with an initiative called ‘Homescape’ to provide furniture to people working from home. The company is providing tables, chairs, and desks to help improve the individual’s productivity and provide them with comfort and ease at the same time.

They have also adopted a Make-in-India approach for this. They have tied up with five vendors across Bengaluru and central India. The ideation, design, and concept are all done by them. These vendors manufacture the products according to their requirements.

In the economy model, they provide a complete workstation including tables and chairs. As the subscription model goes up, so does the facilities. For instance, in the enterprise model, we are providing workstation, lighting, colour customisation, Google-home enabled and internet connectivity as well.

The second company – Suparshva Swabs was originally started in 1992, later formalised in 1998 as Suparshva Swabs, by the late Brij Mohan Lal Jain and his sons. In those years, the company made wooden toothpicks. A small semi-automatic machine for making cotton buds lay unused in its factory. The founder, sensing a business opportunity to replace imported cotton buds, used the machine to begin making the buds.

In the words of the second gen founder Rahul Jain – “After a few years of struggle, we were able to establish ourselves as a local alternative to imported cotton buds. We built a high production capacity. However, the Indian market size was small. So we looked for markets outside India and began exporting to over 15 countries,”.

Till March 2020, polyester swabs for COVID-19 testing were not manufactured in India. They were imported from China or the US. With global demand for the swabs on the rise, it became more difficult and expensive to source them for domestic use.

To solve this problem, the family business converted its 100 percent cotton processing lines at its Ghaziabad factory to produce polyester-spun swabs on automatic production lines, all in just ten days. They started making two million polyester swabs a week and grew it to five million a week towards the end of May. Today the company claims it can alone cater to the entire nation’s requirements of polyester swabs for COVID-19 testing.