Empower Women, Eradicate Poverty

As in my first blog, I mentioned that we chose a project for women empowerment. For those who haven’t read the first blog, our project is “Empower Women, Eradicate Poverty” in which we approached those women who know how to stitch and want to sell their clothes, but due to the lack of skills required today for marketing, they fail. We tried to become their voice and sell their clothes. Last week, we were able to sell 10 clothes. And with the total, we sold 12 clothes in the last 3 weeks.

This is Musarat from Vehaarri at the top right with her children. The one in the hijaab is me.

Every business, especially when you are a beginner as an entrepreneur, faces a wide range of challenges. As the business proceeds, different problems and challenges come your way which need to be solved by hard work, consistency, self-belief, and leadership. The only thing you need to evaluate is your progress so that you can identify the challenges and solve them effectively as soon as possible.

In my previous blog, I was able to identify a few challenges which were :

1. Working in a group of people from different backgrounds and different cities

2. Free riders in the group who later on left the project

3. We were beginners in the world of entrepreneurship

4. Due to a lot of fraud happening in online shopping, people were not trusting a newly created page to order their shirts.

This (upper) is the shirt I ordered from a recognized page and the shirt I received (lower) was quite opposite. It was half sleeves and the quality of the shirt was very rough and the design was not what I ordered.

Other than these challenges, last week was quite hectic:

5. We had commitments other than mega-projects like we had to manage our exams, jobs, weekly project works, etc. We resolved this problem by fixing a particular time for the mega project and working on the mega project with full dedication.

6. We realized one more thing this week which we were missing from day 1, i.e. keeping up with the market. The clothes we tried to sell were already stitched by those women and so they were a bit old-fashioned. We didn’t realize this earlier but after getting feedback from one of our friends, we realized it and we gave the women a new design to stitch and provided them enough money (from profit) to buy a piece of cloth and laces. In this way, we were able to solve the problem which we identified late. But better late than never. We did not leave our positivity while facing all these challenges. We tried to build each other up and did not let anyone feel down.

So, by changing our approach and keeping ourselves with current market trends, we were able to be more productive. Also, initially, our plan was limited to selling their stitched clothes but then we realized that for selling clothes, the women need to buy pieces of cloth, laces, zips, beads, patches, etc which cost a great amount of money. So, we changed our plan to not only sell their clothes but also provide them the orders of stitching from customers. We changed the Instagram page to “Fashion Corner and Stitching Point”. And we were able to get one order of stitching according to the customer’s design in just one week. By this approach, women can get their dresses stitched according to their designs, colors, sizes, etc.

To date, we were able to catch the attention of 15–20 women out of which 12 placed their orders and got their orders delivered within two days. We got so many messages as well that they will shop soon from us. Since we have only a few tailors so currently, we are trying to reach out to two more women to increase our business circle so that we have enough suits to sell.

We want to enhance our circle in this initiative so to sustain it even after fellowship, we have asked the women we already have to use their networks to help us hunt more talent which needs our support. We are finding women who can pack gifts, make handmade bags, jewelry, and other handicrafts, etc. Also, we will be keeping a 15–20% profit from the amount which will be used in the vocational training of those who don’t know how to do these things and want to work. We believe in women empowerment and we will keep on striving no matter how late and slowly we progress. Hard work with consistency is our motto to follow.

Empower women, empower the world.

We are super proud of ourselves that we chose this project and were able to do everything which we planned and being a group leader, I am super proud of my team members who contributed their best and participated to the fullest. Without them, I could not have done a single thing. I hope that we all could play our part to support people like Musarat so that they can earn halaal and pay their expenses without any difficulty.