Where to start?
'The Bloat' is all about my personal take on everything. So let's dive into some personal deets as I am writing after almost 1.5 years. This one is a heart burner with maybe a happy ending or rather no ending at all.
Good news, for everyone reading this, just like you, I am still alive & grateful; we survived!! wohoo. so far...
2020
Picture This.
A seasonal (hate 'seasonal/serial', but language, grammar, vocab was never my strength, so gotta go with the flow) Entrepreneur, who is continuously trying to build one brand, failing at it, crawling with hundreds of questions and suggestions coming her way, on how to uplift a media fund in the difficult times of covid.
I put my company Usherbae in the back burner and then eventually I decide to fully hand it over to my then co-founder. As an Entrepreneur, this was a very tough call for a company that was so young and had so much to achieve- but as a human being, I just let a virus decide my company's very attractive future with me!
As a co-founder, it was easy because the guy co running it, is also my husband. As a wife, it felt very safe! But the hardest was, as an individual, I genuinely had nothing to do. I woke up with no motivation. It was like a bad breakup. Some days, I didn't want to wake up at all. It was the worst phase of my 12 year career and it directly affected my mental health. I didn't feel like myself because my work has always been a big part of my personality.
As I reflected back at that phase, I realised that my biggest strength & weakness, as a businesswoman, is my emotions. Emotions often take over my neutral judgement. But, five years back, instead of changing that about me, I decided to retain it, in my personality. It is what keeps me going and more so makes me 'who I am'. I describe myself, as a newish Business Woman who is not afraid to use data mixed with her gut feeling & her relationships play a vital role even in her decision making. So please don't frown upon the term emotional fool or emotional business woman. I will find you and I will.... Here I was, in middle of covid, in a lockdown, when I decided to change my career trajectory back to a corporate job. It was tough, after 8 years, it was hard to put together a confident face acting like this is my end goal! It was hard for me to stay on track and motivated, reminding myself each day, that this has to be temporary. I used to tell myself every night before my bedtime, "I should not get comfortable in this job and the power to change that, should continue to lie in my hands." 2021 After 365 days of motivational quotes about self love & 'you can do it' memes and podcasts
worn out by the corporate workload of things that didn't make a difference in my life- I felt like a little bear who is back from hibernation, more determined than ever before. I promised myself to not give up, to learn from my mistakes, implement the learnings of the past and keep going. So with no backup plans, nothing playing in my favour to run my life, I did what I am best at ...
I took a risk!
Ignore the fact that I was a risk analyst back in 2009 with JPMorgan or accept the fact that I worked with Blackrock taking huge risks for world's top one percent earners and diversifying their portfolios so their risk is hedged- confused? yeah me too...like I know it all
risk career, risk savings, risk incoming pay, risk love, risk failing again, risk personal comfort, hell yeah...I was ready
I am a risk taker. Another strength thats also my weakness
...sounds like a perfect interview answer.
So coming back to the bear theory. I was done with my hibernation and I was hungry for more. This was bigger than ever. After hitting rock bottom on my self love, I had nothing holding me back. I knew, worse that can happen is that I will be back on the drawing board of my life.
And then, it hit me... what I started as a research project in Jan 2019- what if that becomes real (because I was curious to know, what if I start an athleisure company, that is homegrown ..true story) Would it do well? Is there a need for it? Is it a trend that will die or is it an industry? Is this passion being confused as a business?
note to self- save every excel, piece of paper, ppt, pdf, phone notes that you feel are random.
second note to self - link it all to the cloud & make sure you don't give a 'go ahead' to apple to erase it, when you send your device to them.
Bruh, I had an entire two years behind me to think about all this!
So in the Jan of 2021, I found a girl who was on the same page as me, we both had the 'go big or go home' vibes.
She brought a breathe of fresh air to everything I thought or knew, about running a company.
She had thoughts on making our athleisure idea as size inclusive and we started getting super creative about this whole thing.
It was a tiny idea, but it was ours!
It all started as a beautiful idea that my now co-founder (somedays friend and other days a hard head to head colleague) and me started working on. It took us less than one day to decide, that we were going to call our little venture, aastey!
And it took us just couple of months to figure, that our world doesn't need one more fashion company, if it doesn't care about the environment. We started building, aastey- a sustainable athleisure brand for all body types. We were unstoppable from the start. Because this wasn't a business that was build on an idea that we brainstormed on for just a couple of days. It was built as a solution to cater to some real problems, we women are facing. 1. We were sick of brands and instagram culture dictating what our body size should be. 2. We were sick of paying a premium on brands like lululemon, gymshark, alo to import them to India only because we thought that quality cant be matched. 3. We didn't want to wear something that wont be 100% sustainable at some point in our lives- in today's time of covid and global warming, NOT AT ALL. 4. If anyone can solve these above problems, it was going to be us! We began to build, aastey. Between all these solutions, was heartbreaking memories, defeated times & thankless hours of extreme zoom calls. New cool people joined us or quit on us, Kanupriya (the ultimate co-founder mentioned above) and I did most of the work ourselves (because we didn't want to settle with mediocre or easy mistakes) and we mostly had endless rejections. No manufacturers
No investors
No office
No team
No celebrations
No takers
No launch
No buyers
No breakthroughs
Continuous Lockdown
Incorrect Samples
Mismatched Teams
Inventory overload
Strategies on drive
& google drive :P
That was us!
\\many would call us, crazy.
Someday if you find me or if we are friends, I will tell you all the crazy stories in detail. Oh! One memory One of my closest friends called me one day and said- "why do you guys even have a social page? You haven't launched anything for a year." This was early last year. lol. Yup, because we are crazy!
2022
HAPPY NEW YEAR
So here we are. Going with the flow, hitting certain internal milestones, mostly working on DL but extremely out there on social media, because thats where we found more women like us, who we now call our 'aastey tribe'.
Oh we know, 'no one cares' about what we do. .. yet.
But, what keeps us going is that we really care! We do. We will always, care.
We, live aastey. Everyday Every way.
Our first collection is now live on aastey.com Check it out.
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