Entrepreneurs: 3 Kickass Indian Women
We need more of them. These are the women who wanted to start something, put their skills to use, and got them dollar bills flowing! These are women with passion, drive and the willingness to take risks. These are three incredible female entrepreneurs and, better yet, they’re all Indian!
Richa Kar of Zivame.com
Ms. Kar is the founder of Zivame.com, an online Indian lingerie store which is the largest one of its kind. Kar realized that a lot of Indian women had difficulties in purchasing comfortable, well fitting and sexy lingerie. Speaking from her own experiences, she explained that many stores did not carry all sizes, which made it difficult for her and women in general to buy what they needed. She went on to describe that the process of being measured and scanned in front of everybody was embarrassing, especially when her size was announced out loud in tiny stores. Kar wanted to make lingerie purchasing easier for Indian women like her, so she took advantage of the problem and decided to create her own business to sell lingerie. She believes that “every woman, no matter her size or shape, deserves well fitting and sexy lingerie; and with Zivame I hope to give her that." Check out her website here: https://www.zivame.com/
Anu Sridharan of Nextdrop
This woman saw a problem in India and decided that something needed to be changed. In certain parts of India, it’s difficult to get clean, affordable water and it’s even harder to figure out when you’re going to get your next supply of water. So, Sridharan created Nextdrop to help inform people about the water access issue for urban residents in India. Nextdrop provides reliable information about piped water supply, when the next water supply will reach people’s homes and helps create a feedback loop about better water management and water utility. Nextdrop makes this process so much easier for urban Indians, so that they can actually have water and realistically know when to save up.
Anu Sridharan was named a leading social entrepreneur by Forbes and her website can be found here: https://thenextdrop.com/
Meena Bindraw of Biba Ethnic Wear
Bindraw is an inspiring woman who put her passion for designing clothes to use after her two sons were old enough to take care of themselves. She started out very small, but gained wild success and expanded quickly. She was able to open her first company in 2004 in two malls in Mumbai, In Orbit and CR2. Two years later, billionaire and CEO of Future Group Kishore Biyani bought a 10% stake in Bindraw’s company for Rs 110 crore (over $16 million) which skyrocketed the sales for Biba. In 2012, Bindraw stands at an annual revenue of approximately Rs 300 crore (approx. $45 million), and is still going strong into 2018. The amazing thing about this woman is that she lived whole her life with a passion to design and sell clothes, but didn’t have the opportunity to until later in life. She had a dream and even though it took her a few decades and two kids to establish it, she hustled harder than she had ever before, and she is now both a successful business entrepreneur and a fashion designer. What an inspiration!
"I never imagined it when I started...Now, I feel we can grow to any height, even become a global brand." -Meena Bindraw