Ritesh Parakh is a foodie, a traveler and the co-founder of a baking brand in Chennai
called Beyond Loaf.
He's experimented with a career in jewelry besides other businesses but kept going back
to his true calling.
So how did a debater, a blogger and a qualified engineer find himself wading into a crowded
market and build a name for quality and innovation?
Perhaps the clue is in the number of restaurants he has sampled and has an opinion on.
He is completely into the food scene in Chennai with a gift of the written word he has built
a following with short, pithy and snappy reviews.
But from writing about food to building a business around it is a completely different
proposition.
This is episode 18 of My First Job, the podcast that covers engaging career journeys and every
single one of them is full of twists, turns and insights.
I am Venu Gopal Nair, the host of this podcast and CEO of Ideascape Communications, an advertising
agency into branding, creative and design.
So settle in, sit back and enjoy the conversation or tune in with your headphones when you're
on your daily walk.
Ritesh, welcome to the show.
Hi Mr. Venu, how are you doing?
I'm good.
Good to have you on the show.
Chennai is a city which is traditional.
Yes, there was this experiment about hot breads and started 20, 30 years ago.
But what is it that got you interested?
Honestly, it was just the love for food.
That's the base of where it started, but more than anything, it was during the lockdown
where my wife, Shikha, she started experimenting with making breads at home.
I mean, no prior experience.
Both of us only have prior experience in eating a lot of different food, but making it ourselves
was not something that either of us are good at.
In some way, like during the lockdown, she found great passion for making bread.
I mean, no pun intended, but we wanted to see how we can play around and take it a little
beyond.
That's pretty much how it started.
It was just a bunch of random internet recipes that we started trying and then we started
talking to different friends of ours, different people.
And we even just thought that, okay, why don't we put this into bread and see what happens?
And that's pretty much how we started.
Okay.
We'll come to where you are right now. In your blog, you describe yourself as and please
bring in any references to Shikha and how she's been a part of this journey at any point
in time.
You passed out of Venkateshwara and you're a mechanical engineer.
I was always writing reviews for restaurants on Zomato thinking that it's the right thing
to do per se
Somewhere in that there was a new restaurant coming up and they reached out to me and they
said that, Hey, we would love to have you over.
We are launching a new restaurant.
And I went there and I see this bunch of 30 other people who are also people whose reviews
I had read on Zomato at different points of time.
I reached there and I was like, wow, okay, this is a real thing.
And that night I went back home and created an Instagram account by the name, the Vpanda.
And that's how my food blogging journey started from childhood.
My first thing that I would do when I would reach home from school or college is go to
the kitchen and try to smell and guess what's going to be cooking in the kitchen.
One is that you're ravenous after coming back from school and the kind of appetite that
you have in school is can't be replicated.
Unfortunately, there is a slide later on, but you can never eat the way you could eat
in school and college.
So food was one of the things that interested you, but what were the other things that you
were looking at?
Were you really seriously considering something in terms of a career or how were you?
I would always say on a weekly basis, at least 10 people would call me saying that, Hey,
Panda, tell me which restaurant should we go to?
Hey, Panda, I'm at this restaurant.
What should I order?
Dude, listen, I'm going to this restaurant.
You know someone over there so we can get good service.
So on a weekly basis, I would get 10 calls and this is at the height of my food blogging
time.
It's something that of course I lost interest in as well for different reasons, but that's
sort of where I was like, okay, I want to do something with this.
What that something is, is something I have to figure out.
It took a COVID-19 outbreak interest from my wife into making bread to make it happen.
I'm grateful for how lucky we turned out to be that way.
I also noticed that you worked for some time at Carrot Lane.
So what were some of the other business ventures that you got into?
Just straight out of college, I worked in a visual effects company that was just starting
out at that time.
We did a few local projects.
I'm not going to name them because we never got paid.
I was working in the visual effects company for a year.
I was more on the operations side of it, where we would actually go out to studios and go
out to shoots, be visual effects directors over there.
I mean, I would be under my founder, so I would assist him wherever he would go.
Just hiring, managing operations day to day, making sure that our work schedule is rolled
out.
Because about two and a half years into mechanical engineering, I realized I'm never going to
do something related to this.
And when I told my father that, my father said, listen, you've taken off something.
It's best that when you take off something, you complete it.
Once I completed engineering, then it was always going to be just trying to work and
finding where my passion lies, honestly.
Strangely enough, food was a passion that continued throughout all the different things
I did in life.
So what is this, Panda is a nickname?
Honestly, it was the movie Kung Fu Panda.
My first name was actually Kung Food Panda.
And then I realized it's too long.
So I just changed it to the Vee Panda, the vegetarian Panda.
That is the idea.
So you've never found being vegetarian a limitation?
Not at all.
In fact, with my family, I traveled to the US for about a month.
We ate in completely vegan or vegetarian restaurants throughout the month.
It was not necessarily Indian.
I think our Indian meals were the worst meals that we had in the entire trip.
Some of the best food we had, we had Ethiopian, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, and all that vegetarian
vegan restaurants.
And it's not just the US, Europe, even Southeast Asia, wherever you go, you get amazing food
options these days.
And vegetarian food is never a worry.
In fact, they are more strict than us also.
So yeah, that's the amazing part.
I think today's generation is getting a lot of inputs from global destinations.
It's not necessarily that you went only to the places within India and exposure to a
whole lot of things.
I just wanted to get a little listing of how this career journey evolves.
What happened?
What were the stages?
I know for sure I gave my family a lot of stress.
We've been privileged enough to be able to make choices that do not impact our financial
situation in any way.
We've been lucky with that and we've been lucky to get the support of our family to
be able to do that as well.
I give a lot of credit to my uncle, my father, my brother, and my family in general to, you
know, their first reflex response is no, because I mean, that's what anybody should do, honestly,
if they say yes once it's never worth it.
Eventually, with the right amount of answering their questions, they've been more than supportive.
After the visual effects stint, one of our family friends and I, we got together, we
said, okay, virtual reality seems like a big thing.
He came with the idea to me and I said, okay, I just came out of VFX, so I know how some
bit of visual effects works.
I know how to sell.
Let's see what we can do.
We created these amazing visual effects models where we actually went to schools and did
demos where kids would put on a virtual reality headset.
And they would, for example, if they're learning human anatomy, they would actually be able
to play with the physical model.
And then at the end of their class, they would have a quiz saying that place the right body
part in the right place, something which is more visual, more practical and more realistic
to learn.
I'm sure even now I get confused where my longest in this times are or where my diaphragm
is.
I still, I'm still not sure, but I'm sure if I learned it in a visual way, we would
remember it better.
But we also spoke to a lot of people.
We used to cold call, cold call and cold email about 100 people every week as investors or
as school partners or people who are in the field of education.
And it was a very interesting time because my partner in this, he had a full time job.
So we used to meet at Starbucks every night from eight o'clock to two o'clock in the
night.
We used to sit there and work.
And then in the day I would get onto my task of reaching out to people.
And that was very interesting.
We also realized that it was too soon.
I mean, visual reality for education is still not taken off.
Yeah.
I mean, there is so much about right place, right time and right opportunity because even
today the point is that do you have the processing power?
Is it inexpensive enough to roll out at scale in schools?
Is it something that because the pandemic really showed us the limitations of what online
could actually do.
There were a set of people for whom online education was fine.
There was a whole lot of people who had just one device at home.
I mean, it has to be scalable at some point, right?
How was your pitch?
We were learning with every pitch, honestly.
It started as virtual reality for education.
It eventually evolved into creating modern pedagogy, reducing the amount of time a child
spends in school, but increasing the amount they learn with every minute spent in school.
We wanted to pitch it to schools and parents saying that, hey, you can actually run your
schools for a shorter amount of time, but the learning is so much more exponential.
It's a good pitch because I think in the ed tech sector, there were a number of companies,
but the one that seems to be doing really well is physics.
Well, for example, yeah, it's true.
YouTube and lectures, which is accessible to practically everyone.
So when was it that you decided that this is not going places?
Before I decided to do this full time, I also had of course, discussed it with my family.
They said, okay, you don't go ahead and do it.
It's something crazy that if you succeed, you can go somewhere.
And if you fail, you fail miserably, but you can't keep doing this forever.
So give us a timeline that how much time should we give you?
They gave me about 12 to 15 months.
And they said that if you're able to do something and take it somewhere, otherwise you join
the family.
And that was not something that was on your horizon.
You had your own path.
Yeah.
I always felt like because we have enough hands in the family, we could always diversify
and everyone was on the same thought process.
What are the kind of questions your father would ask you?
I'm a little curious as to how would he figure out whether you knew this would make money
or not?
I think being Marwadi, you have it in your blood to be an entrepreneur.
That part of it is undisputable to some extent.
So it was not just my father, my father, his elder brother and my brother.
So I had three fathers who I had to answer to plus my mother back home.
They would start with why?
What are you thinking?
What's the thought process behind it?
Why do you think that something like this will succeed or why do you think that something
like this should even exist?
It just starts with why and then...
What is the answer to that why?
What is the answer you gave them?
I said that it seems like this is the future of technology where technology is headed.
At that time, this is 2014-15.
Virtual reality is going to be mass produced by 2020.
At least that's how it was positioned.
So we thought that getting in early, we would be at the forefront of that as well.
That was how I tried to convince them.
It was not exactly very successful.
So what is the Carrot Lane phase like?
So between virtual reality and Carrot Lane, we also had a print packaging factory where
these chips packets, masala packets and all of that.
We had a factory that would produce these plastic covers, printed plastic covers.
I was there for about three years, but somehow never enjoyed the entire process.
I really, really tried.
That was the option given by my family that, okay, now this is something you have to do.
Now that you've taken two and a half or three years to do whatever you wanted to do, I think
you should try what we tell you to do now.
Completely fair to them as well.
They've been extremely supportive.
They come from a lot of experiences as well.
About 60 years between them.
I said, okay, let me try this for about three years almost.
I went every day to the factory.
I really enjoyed the part of how to convert a customer.
B2B is a different ball game in that.
It was a great experience in understanding how people are thinking of their packaging.
A lot of that came to Beyond Loaf later.
My partner at the time also was extremely supportive in every way.
I really enjoyed working with him as well, but I didn't see a future for myself over
there.
It was a very tough conversation to have honestly, because I got married in November of 2018.
In December, I went to my dad, uncle and brother and told them that I don't think I can continue
doing this anymore.
They had this expectation also fairly that you just got married and you're just trying
to get very unstable again.
How many chances do you think we should give you?
It was a very uncomfortable period, but again, that's what family is about.
They are there to ask you the hard questions.
They're there to pull you out of that as well.
At the end of that, I said, okay, do an MBA.
I thought, okay, just be away from everything for a year.
Go abroad or do whatever.
Let me just try studying for a year so that I can refresh my mind and sort of come back
with fresh ideas on what to do next.
This is also about the time where I was reading about a lot of startups and that's when I
met Mr. Mithun, who is the founder of Carat Lane at a wedding.
I told him that I want to meet you.
Can I come meet you?
He asked me what is this about?
I said, I want to come work for you.
I'm looking for businesses.
So he told me his email ID at the wedding and I emailed him.
He replied back that same night or the next day morning.
I said, okay, meet me for lunch at Copper Chin Meal today.
And this was a Saturday, I think it was the third or fourth of May 2019.
I said, sure.
Okay.
So I met him there and he asked me, what have you been doing so far over lunch?
We had a great conversation and I already knew him externally about how impressive he
was, but just meeting him in person was overwhelming to a different degree because I never thought
that the CEO of a company would casually say, okay, sure.
Let's meet for lunch tomorrow.
He said, okay, join Monday.
All this while I hadn't discussed it back with family.
As soon as I went and told my dad and my uncle, and they said, no way.
How much more time do you need?
After a year, what will you get out of it?
And I said, see, they're building a business.
They're working at scale.
They've gone through the stage where they were a startup.
Now they're a full fledged business.
They've got 500 employees at that time.
I think they have 1,200 employees today.
When I joined them, they had 50 stores.
They have 220 stores today.
Just working directly under someone like that and getting paid to work that was like getting
paid to do an MBA.
That was my pitch that sort of convinced.
I would take my brother to the carotene office and that's where they want me to work.
That got them convinced as well.
What is that experience like?
What does it like working in a company that was trying to sell jewelry online?
It was incredible.
Just the way that they approach design, the way that they approach selling to customers,
the way that they go for the entire customer cycle, the way they position the brand, the
way they were merging online and offline.
The entire focus was so much on making sure that the customer having an online experience
and offline experience is at par with each other.
I got to be in different sections of the company as well because working directly under the
CEO.
I got to see some bits of the production.
I got to see some bits of the finance part of it.
I got to see some bits of branding, some bits of how they are thinking of building new modes
for the business.
Now that we're good at this business, we've built the fort.
Now how do we build a mode around it?
Other e-commerce companies, very small article, practically nothing.
I think two grams and three grams is a lot of gold.
If you were to send it through post in Korea, there weren't systems available to ensure
that the safety and the security of the delivery was assured.
Initially, I think that was a challenge for them.
But at that scale, it was very easy for them because they were logistic companies that
were specifically working only in this domain for jewelry and cash and gold and silver and
diamonds.
All of it moves in short.
The chances of something happening is very minimal and that is something that only once
you reach at a stage where, okay, we're sitting on the same table, that these things can be
discussed.
Yeah.
You have enough business to give companies of that size who can ensure it and then carry
it and all of those things.
It is the early bit when you're trying to strike that match and find a flare and say
that from here, the business will take off.
So by the time you were joining, you were in Carrot Lane, you were saying they were
looking at scaling the business substantially.
They were already doing pretty well.
They had 50 stores at that point.
By the time I left, they had 180, which was a year and a half later.
And in fact, after we started Beyond Loaf at home during the lockdown, because we were
all working from home, one of the first people I sent a box to was my boss.
He told me, this is really good stuff, man.
You should, what are you doing with it?
Over the next few months from say July 2020 up to November in and out, he would just keep
asking, okay, what's happening?
In December, he told me, stop coming to office tomorrow.
I think you should do this full time.
I didn't tell him at the time that apart from the time that I was in office, the mornings
and evenings, I was doing this.
It's wonderful when you work for people who are interested in having you succeed, not
necessarily in the organization, but to say that do well at whatever you're doing.
Absolutely.
That's what you're interested in.
A lot of it is also because you have to take that initiative to surround yourself with
people like that as well.
A lot of this is chance that those people have agreed to let you be around them.
So you have to try.
Like you said, right in the beginning, you belong to a family that's been in business.
So you understand risk, you understand what is involved in running a business in a lot
of Indian middle-class families.
That is practically out of the question.
Business is frowned upon.
That is a risky thing.
And the most that parents do is invest in mutual funds or post office deficits and stuff
like that.
So you have a seat at the dinner table to see how business gets done.
Because that's what would happen practically every day.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we would always hear stories about how when my dad and uncle moved to Chennai, they
are originally from Jodhpur.
So they're the first generation in Chennai as well.
How they would go for deliveries in buses, go for deliveries in cycles.
And every day they would look at their book of accounts.
That was that time was done manually as well.
And the day they would actually lack in sales, they would celebrate.
There was one scooter between them, so they would decide which would be the couple who
would get that scooter that weekend.
So you'd hear stories like that.
It's not easy, but it's worth it.
I think that's the amount of commitment you put into something.
It's not just luck does play a role, but how long can you continue to do what you're doing?
Maybe the difference is that the opportunities for new businesses was far limited earlier.
What you're doing today is something that was the corner store, the Iyengar bakery,
which would come up with a set of puffs and pastries and buns.
And that was it.
That is it.
Wouldn't really go beyond that.
But today you have not just the opportunity for the business, but you have a whole lot
of ways in which the audience for this has expanded dramatically.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like a lot comes down to exposure as well.
I've spent every summer holiday of mine in Delhi.
So my mom is from Delhi and the house is in Chandni Chowk in Paranthewali, Delhi.
And we would enter the street, we would be smelling jalebi on one side.
We'd enter the street and we'd smell jalebi on one side, naan katha on one side, paranthewali
on one side, lassi on the other side.
So we'd literally be smelling that for 45 days in a row, every single day.
Just being exposed to some kind of cuisines, enjoying experimenting a lot.
This feels like a culmination of all of that.
This is slight to say, why is it that chart in Delhi and all of these places just tastes
so much better?
I think it's a lot to do with the water.
Also people being specific about taste.
One of the caterers here told me, sir, you're only asking for taste in pani puri.
Most people here, when we give them water and put some masala in that, they're okay
with that as pani puri.
You are not my target customer.
We can't serve customers like you.
Amazing exposure because if you've grown up in places where flavor is, it runs rampant.
Paranthewali Gully is known not just in Delhi, but anywhere.
Bengali street.
Yeah, Bengali market.
You know, when it came to this, was it mainly because she took up baking?
Yeah, absolutely.
Were there things that you were exploring?
We were cooking different things every day because we had the privilege to as well.
She just took up making breads and that's full credits to her on that.
Nobody had to push her.
She did this like every afternoon.
We would all go take a nap at two o'clock and then we would hear the kitchen sounds
coming in from our bedrooms knowing that, okay, now the next two to three hours, you
can't disturb Shikha at all because she's making bread.
What kind of breads was she experimenting with?
She started with the very basics, like just a regular loaf of bread.
And then she had done a course in 2019, our family friend of ours, Ritu aunty, who helped
us a lot along the way.
With any doubts we had, we just follow up and we're like, Ritu aunty, this is not coming
right.
What do we do?
And she's a homemaker herself.
She's somebody who's been passionate about baked goods as well.
She had done this course in 2019, but nothing came off of it.
And in the lockdown, she just pulled up the pile of recipes and just started making them
one by one.
The beauty of her Marwadi kitchen is that the number of ingredients and masalas and
different spices that you can find in an earthenware Marwadi kitchen is amazing.
We have an entire store room filled with those things.
So we could just go crazy, you know, playing with different things.
Started making bread somewhere in May.
This is when the full lockdown was still in play.
When things started opening in June, she was still experimenting a lot.
At one point it became too much bread at home.
What we started doing is for the few hours that you were allowed to go out, we would
take our car and go to a friend's house and just drop off some bread at their place saying
that, Hey guys, try this out.
And we kept getting good feedback.
I told someone about it.
They want to know how can they order it?
And we said, no, no, we're not taking orders for it.
We just made some extra bread.
So we thought we'll drop it off at their place.
That was the first scene.
After that, we were very intentional about a lot of things.
We had a very good friend who helped us design our logo, our branding, our packaging.
Shikha's sister, who was passionate about photography, she made sure that our stuff
looks as good as it tastes as well.
If not better.
We got very lucky that we had this network of people that we could turn to over calls
and we could done those things to them.
And suddenly photographs would appear.
Sadly, we had a great logo, great branding.
My experience in Karat Lane, I was working in customer support for a month at the most
peak time, which was Diwali, that also taught me that how do you manage an entire customer
journey?
How do you communicate with the customer with as precise detail, with as little words as
possible, but get the information across so that they have the least number of questions
to you.
Give me an example of an instruction, Ratesh.
From Karat Lane or beyond those?
Because we've had...
Karat Lane.
I'm saying Karat Lane, because that's where you started to learn.
So there would be customers who would have ordered for somebody's birthday and the delivery
date on the website would show that it will deliver after the birthday.
But they would say that, no, now that we've placed the order, you have to deliver it within
this day.
And then the team would somehow rally together, make sure that the customer would get the
delivery on the day that they are requesting for it.
Some parts of chat happened during the lockdown when people had placed orders before the lockdown
began and they were wondering, where is my order?
And we would get some angry customers calling us, messaging us, sending emails, saying that,
where is my order?
And then the time when the entire country is at a complete standstill.
People were still expecting their orders to come in, which was a great experience to handle
because the customer is always right.
No matter what you say, there are times when you don't want to entertain those customers
as well.
It's also something that once in a business you realize it's so difficult to get a customer
to you.
Like the amount of effort that it takes to bring a customer.
One good customer can bring you another good customer, but one bad customer experience
takes away 20 good customers from you.
That kind of learning is something that you'll know only if you've been in the business,
especially in a service business.
I always, people who are younger to me, I always tell them that like the first two years
of your career, just walk under a good person who can put you in different parts of the
business.
If business is your end goal, learning to do business is an art in itself.
Even whether it's a business or not, even if you want to learn a career, develop on
your career, being in different parts of functions within an organization teaches you a lot more
about what is involved in getting that aspect of it done.
How do you, for example, why did Caracolade need to have showrooms when 90% of the experience
is online?
One of it is confidence, right?
I need the customer to see the article before they buy it.
Absolutely.
You know, that's like a huge bridge.
So the moment they see the article, then they say, huh, this is not something that is just
online and it will be sent to me.
I know that this actually exists.
That kind of understanding comes only when you realize why is it that certain businesses
have to be this mix of online and offline?
Who are your early guinea pigs, your old friends?
I'm the earliest guinea pig here.
But I guess you were the most willing one as well.
Yeah, I still have.
So a lot of people actually ask us that aren't you bored of your own breads by now?
Because now that you've seen it a few thousand times in front of you.
And I always tell them that, no, I mean, we always wanted to make products that you don't
get bored of.
And we've not gotten bored of our products at all.
Because you can make what you really like.
You source your ingredients locally.
We buy everything locally.
We don't import anything.
Most ingredients are easily available locally.
Sometimes it takes an effort.
Sometimes it adds to the cost of it, but it's worth it.
We also try to buy ingredients that are available locally, but are also available nationally.
This is only keeping scalability in mind that our vision is that in five years, we want
to be in a few more cities.
We shouldn't have to play with our recipes again or do R&D and experimentation again.
We try to standardize things as much as possible.
But then there are a few things that you only get locally.
For example, we have a product called Podi Bombs.
So the Malavya Podi that you get in Chennai, you cannot get it anywhere else.
So you'll have to export it from Chennai.
Let's say if it was not the online era.
The earlier thing is if you wanted to set up a baking business, you would have had to
have a physical store.
The beauty of online is that at least in the beginning part of it is people can forgive
you for being new and you don't have to open a store or open a physical space with a hundred
different products available.
We had the liberty to start with five products for almost six months.
We only added two products at that time.
We have 70 products today, but at that time we had only seven products for the first seven,
eight months.
We were successful with that.
That's only possible online.
The same thing offline, somebody coming to a store and seeing seven products on your
rack, they would laugh at you and they'd be like, I don't know why they're doing this
because they shouldn't.
With seven products, how do they even expect for more people to come back and buy it?
And the perception is very different, Ritesh.
If you walk into a store and find only seven articles there, you think one of two things
that you don't have enough stock or that this is old stock and it didn't sell.
Instruction plays such a huge role and plus where you played a lot of the thing is to
ensure that the packaging, the way it reached people was itself the experience.
We were one of those first few brands during COVID who had an instruction card that came
along with the box.
Earlier, we never used to have these pre-printed boxes.
It was a normal white box that we could, so my mom went out of the way on this.
She would like wear double masks and then go to Saukhape and source these boxes like
while we were making things at home.
We would just have these boxes, but we always wanted to give them extra wow effect.
Shikha was very keen on having a ribbon on top of every box and we would actually hand
pack every box, but those ribbons were something only Shikha could pack.
We could never figure out how to tie that ribbon right.
At that point, it was 20, 25 boxes a day being hand packed with ribbons and we would add
a tag to it.
We would add a card inside that would tell you how to heat it, how to store it, what
to do with that box.
If there's something left over, what to do as soon as you receive the box as well if
you want to eat it right away.
There were these few things that were very intentional.
Again, keeping that part where we wanted to make sure that we answered customers' questions
before it came to us.
Our branding was very intentional.
Our packaging was very intentional.
We could have saved, put it in a plastic bag and put a sticker on it.
It would have probably cost us three rupees where our carton box costs 20, 25 bucks.
But I feel like in the long run that has paid off for us as well because when you receive
a product, you should feel happy about it.
We have had those experiences earlier with different brands and we wanted to see how
we can create that with our product.
So did you add all these instructions about how to eat it, how to store it and all that
before?
Yeah, straight off the bat, we were sure we wanted to give these instructions.
Initially, we were messaging it to customers, but then we realized nobody goes through a
long message.
It has to be made visual.
A couple of weeks of starting, we had these printed cards with us.
And the early bit when you started off Ritesh, you told me that you used to take orders only
on Saturday and Tuesday.
What was the thinking behind that?
You said this is my capacity and why Saturday and why Tuesday?
It was simple.
On Tuesdays, you would take orders for Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
On Saturdays, you would take orders for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
It was only to make people feel like, oh, they didn't have to wait another week to order.
That is the only thinking at that time.
We knew that we had one hour at home.
We have only as many hands at home.
This is something that all of us were doing for the first time.
Today, if you ask us to stand in the kitchen for the entire day, we can.
But back then, like four or five hours and we would be lying down on the bed for like
10 hours after that, because it was just so difficult.
It was so much more manually driven where we were needing the doors by hand.
We were doing every single thing possible by hand.
Right now also, we only reduce the dependency on handmade things by maybe 5%.
It's still 95% dependent on being handmade.
In advertising, in any brand, perceived scarcity is always a great selling tool.
We saw it first time that scarcity is a great selling tool.
We also saw how quickly it became a habit for customers in the sense that there were
two kinds of habits.
One was the kind of customer who thought that, okay, great.
I know I need to show up at this time and my order would be taken.
The second kind of customer was no point.
I'm not even going to try.
Once you decided that you would take orders all the time, how was the transition managed?
So we would have this Excel sheet, which we're still using, fortunately or unfortunately,
where we would color code the number of boxes we would have available.
Until those boxes were filled up, we were taking orders.
And we would have three phones on which Instagram would be open.
And three of us between Shikha, Shikha Siddharth, Riddhi and me, three of us would have our
phones open and one laptop open in front of us.
Okay, you're talking to this customer, you talk to this customer, you talk to this customer.
All three of us would be entering, punching in the orders.
And that's pretty much how we went.
We would plan ahead that, okay, these are the number of slots we had.
Every couple of weeks, you would try to say increase it by maybe one slot or half a slot
or you would try to take in more customers.
It was a lot of fun initially, but when people slowly started telling us, hey, if I want
something for today, I really can't get something for today.
Really?
So those things started hitting us plus in two and a half months.
So my mom was saying that now you guys are messing up my kitchen.
So I think you guys should get out now.
Shikha's first minions were my mom and I.
So we were the ones who were sitting and working with Shikha day in and day out.
For the longest time, I think another five, six months after that, my mom was still coming
every day to the kitchen until we got enough people who then Shikha started training.
That's just how we grew slowly.
So how do you manage your inventory these days?
I mean, how do you gauge?
It's based on the orders.
It's based on...
Because we do this every day, we sort of go like, okay, what do we think we can sell today?
That's just the basis of what we plan.
There's no extrapolation of data yet.
We want to move in that direction, but we still think we're too small.
We're too hands on to not be able to do this.
We call this my first job podcast, but I think in your case, it's been a journey of discovery
in the sense that, okay, I like...
Multiple first jobs.
Yeah, a lot of people don't have this kind of breadth of exposure or the contacts or
the network that is normally available.
Sometimes a fair amount of time is spent in just getting that network in place.
But having got that on the outside, it seems that you build a business, but you really
spoke about it when you said eight hour days when you're up on your feet and you're doing
hand mixing and that's what it takes.
I don't think people see that aspect of it at all because once it comes out into the
it's delivered home, the effort never shows in the presentation.
I mean, it was amazing like throughout.
So we just had a baby boy about a month and a half back.
So throughout her pregnancy as well, Shikha was working here.
It was just something that brought so much joy to her as well.
She's waiting right now to get back into the kitchen.
There are days where, you know, we've showed up at 5am, 4am at the kitchen or left the
kitchen at 12 in the night, 1 in the night and each of our product like bread as a process
is a four hour process.
From the start to finish, it takes four hours.
Like you cannot squeeze that timeline without, of course, adding some sort of dirt into the
breads.
You cannot shorten that process.
A lot of our customers probably don't realize that and for good reason, of course, we don't
expect everyone to be aware of how a loaf of bread is made.
So they expect that, okay, I'm placing an order now.
Why can't I get it in an hour?
Yeah, definitely if you make biryani, we would give it to you in an hour.
But bread was something that takes the time it takes and teaches you a lot of patience
as well because you have to wait.
There's nothing you can do.
That to a large extent is an analogy of how career is, how life is.
You can put in the effort, but the results in this particular case, you know, if you
put in this ingredient, you will get this result.
But in a career, you can't just put in the effort and expect exactly the same results
to come out.
Yeah, that's part of it.
Absolutely.
But it's amazing how you kind of, did you think it would be so much work when you started?
Definitely not.
So that simple assumption, if I say it in Hindi, it will happen.
You know, it will happen.
But a lot of times the effort that goes in, like at the end of the day, you hit the bed
way more energetic than when you started the day because of just how good a day it was.
Sometimes you just hit the bed saying that I'm done with this.
I can't see, I can't talk to another customer again.
I can't see another piece of bread again.
That's just how you think.
Do you think you're missing out on anything?
Absolutely not.
I think that we're very fortunate to have a great team who has our back even when they're
not there.
We're very fortunate to have great support in friends and family who are always there
whenever we've called upon them.
I don't think we're missing out on anything.
There's always something we'll miss out on, but I don't think we regret any of that.
Terrific.
Real pleasure talking to you because it's quite a journey.
There are conventional careers or at least they're seen as conventional careers.
Go into a corporate organization, do a certain amount of work, learn, take it forward, get
the next thing.
Whereas you've kind of, maybe you didn't know that this is really be something that you
wanted to do.
But once you've gotten to it, I don't think both you and your wife just plunged into it.
And I'm amazed that your mother went all through the right packaging.
That's the kind of help that I think only a business family could really hope to get.
There's a lot of gratefulness there, not just to the help we've had, but also to our customers,
you know, who backed us through and through.
We have some incredible customers.
So good that we often don't even remember the bad ones, honestly.
Close their eyes and just say that, okay, I'm giving this to you.
We know that you guys are good, so you'll make something good happen.
That kind of trust, at times that is scary because when you have that kind of a trust
from a customer, the expectations are also very high.
So it becomes all the more difficult for you to manage that.
When we're opening the store now, so that's the biggest challenge that we are worried
about internally.
We've built this trust over the last two and a half years.
So now how do we keep our customers happy through this process?
You'll find a way to finish like you've done for everything else before this.
Okay.
Absolutely.
So thank you for being on the show.
It's been a wonderful experience talking to you and all the best for the show, the store,
the expansion and for your career in future.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for having us.
And on behalf of my team and on behalf of myself, thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Deepa as well for having us here.
My first job, the podcast is a production from Ideascape Communications.
Guest relations, promotions and creative is managed by Deepa Ravi with occasional support
by Venu Gopal Nair.
Archiving and technical help is provided by LPS Jayachandran.