Mumbai: Today, women are breaking the glass ceiling in every sector. Beyond all this, there still exists a patriarchal mindset. Not many women are in the C-suite taking important decisions. And, of course, there still exists pay parity.
This Women’s Day, we, at Indiantelevision.com, are acknowledging some women leaders of the media, marketing, and advertising fraternity and also from other professions, who have given more than expected.
Her Journey
Shobitam was launched on 8 March 2019 (International Women’s Day) by founders Aparna and Ambika with a deep sense of purpose and big bold vision to democratize ethnic fashion globally.
It all started with a family conversation over a coffee about how Authentic Indian Handlooms and Weaves are so wonderful and how they need to be made more accessible, contemporary, and affordable across the globe. And so started the journey of Shobitam, with just 20 products that were listed on Etsy, where we now have over 2000+ products available on our website where we work with over 540+ weavers across 19 cities in India.
For 3 years, we have sold to tens of thousands of customers in over 40 countries and grown to become one of the fastest-growing D2C ethnic fashion brands. From shipping from a one-room office, we now have more than 50 employees globally who work from our offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Jaipur and across the USA. We have grown similarly on Social Media – from just a few hundred followers in 2019 to over 64K globally across Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. We have also won 3 awards in the apparel & fashion category like India Fashion Forum 2023 excellence in Women’s Wear and most admired D2C brand in women’s apparel & fashion etc.
Her Inspiration & inspiring the team
Our mantra has always been ‘Weavers First, Customers First’. We are obsessed with giving only the best to our customers, while at the same time, we work directly with our weavers and artisans (eliminating all middlemen) to ensure they get a fair price for their work as well. Our customers are our greatest inspiration, where they have given us over 7000+ 5 Star Customer Reviews so far and we are forever striving to give the best products and services to them.
This mantra of putting both our weavers and customers first in everything we do helps us to imbibe in our team the customer-centric approach in all of our processes – be it products or services. Customer delight is what the team always aims for and we obsess on this mantra to build a world-class brand from India, for the world!
Empowerment of Women
Shobitam is a women-led startup where we deeply care about both uplifting and empowering all women, especially the hard-working and bold women entrepreneurs who are striving to make a difference.
We consistently reach out to women weavers across the country to help them earn a livelihood while keeping their craft alive by popularizing their talent with weaves across the Shobitam platform globally. Examples of these are the vegan sarees that we source from women’s self-help groups who have been instrumental in designing weaves with vegetable residues to create eco-friendly sarees. Similarly, we have empowered our talented team of women artisans who design, stitch and deliver the falls, pico and tassels for every Shobitam Saree!
Supporting all fellow women entrepreneurs and enabling them in their journey is an equally important mission for Shobitam – this is why we have partnered with BITS Pilani to setup the Shobitam centre for women entrepreneurship, a first-of-its-kind initiative in India and have made a contribution of Rs one crore to set up the center.
We look forward to building, enabling and scaling the support ecosystem for all women entrepreneurs and being the agent of change we would all like to see for successful women!
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