Welcome to another episode of #LeadersTalk. As we all know we welcome the budding #entrepreneurs in this show and try to know how they began writing their stories on to the canvas of #entrepreneurship. Although many entrepreneurs make way for their stories, however only a few succeed in this journey. Who gets the success and why, this is a mystery for many of us. And to unfold such treasures of mysteries, we welcome such people on our #show. They are still at the beginning of their moves and struggling to grow. Let’s know from them where they get the inspiration from and why do they not change their way even after so many struggles.
We have Shweta Chowdhary, founder of Wardrobe, with us. ‘Wardrobe’ is a mobile application that works on the philosophy of what to buy and where to buy from. It is the fashion social networking app. Choosing what to wear is a big problem we come across in our day-to-day life and then where would we get it from is the other one where our mind starts doing acrobatics. Taking this issue, a thought came to her mind a year back and she did some surveys among her friends initially. The results came out favorably with flying colors. Then, she explored further into different age groups too and received tremendous response. It is really surprising to know the output from her survey that on an average people spend 36 hours a month to decide what to wear and where to get it from.
Shweta began with her initial designs by creating wireframes herself. Because of financial challenges when she could not afford heavy charges for application creation, she took the help of some engineering students to make one. Within 2-3 months the app was ready and came out with wonderful responses from the influencers. In the testing phase itself, the Wardrobe application grabbed 400 influencers.
Currently, the app is on 3000 downloads after just 3 months of its launch and within a span of 3 months, Shweta targets the app-downloads to be 25000. She visualizes and seeks growth 8 times in the next quarter.
Shweta is also an author of ‘Being an Entrepreneur’s wife’, which she wrote after her marriage. Her husband’s passion for work inspired her to write this book.
She considers herself fortunate enough to get all the support from her family. As far as the professional part is concerned India accelerator helps her by providing her mentorship, getting the right connections and getting the funds too. Currently, she is managing the business by taking the financial support from her husband, however in the coming months, she would start generating the funds from this app too.
As an advice to the new and budding entrepreneurs Shweta Chowdhary says not to start something until one is passionate about it, as it demands a lot of sacrifices at many ends. For escaping the financial challenges, she advises joining Start-up communities where one may lot of financial help through angel investors. If you have good ideas and you think you may execute them well, then the start-up community assists completely. One can seek help with joining the start-up communities, incubation centers (Government has opened many); one may apply for accelerator programs too.
According to Shweta’s viewpoint, one should focus on setting smaller targets and completing them rather than bigger goals. Each step counts in a big leap.
Shweta dreams to grow her project bigger and wants to give employment to more people. She would come out with openings for women who may work from home, especially for women who couldn’t continue after the deliveries, and for interns too. She has dignity for work and believes that no work is small.
Wardrobe app prima-facie looks like Instagram. It gives an option to people to post the pictures of their attires and costumes on the app and if there is any purchase done, they may earn commission on it. The app also gives an option to its customers to ask one’s friends, how a particular dress would look on them. Another feature of the app is for second-hand dresses by big fashion influencers which are worn only once and appears to be new. The customers would be able to buy them at dirt-cheap price through the app. Shweta also targets to use this app for fashion consultancy wherein mere Rs. 200 you may get solutions to one’s fashion queries from the fashion influencers of one’s choice.
In the next five years, Shweta sees her app ‘Wardrobe’ to be the biggest fashion application. It would cater to all the queries related to Fashion. She is very passionate about the app and dreams to take it globally too. The whole team of Leaders Talk wishes Shweta all the best for all her future endeavours.
