Starting with International Women’s Day in March, THE TEENAGER TODAY has been bringing you a series ‘Women Mean Business’. Each article profiles an inspiring woman entrepreneur or professional, insights into what shaped them and their experience of entrepreneurship.

The sweltering heat is finally behind us and one thing that must surely have helped in getting through the summer is that favourite of young and old alike — a cold, refreshing ice cream!

The origins of ice-cream have never been clearly established with some accounts tracing it to China in 7 A.D. to even 200 B.C. It was only in 1956 that ice-cream machinery was imported to India by Kwality Ice Creams, and operations began on a commercial scale at their New Delhi factory. Presently, India is the third largest producer of ice cream in the world, close on the heels of the USA and Japan. So what inspired Darshan Kaur Khalsa to venture into this industry?

Mumbai-based Darshan’s family was already in the ice-cream business as distributors for Kwality Ice Cream. When Kwality was bought by Walls, they disbanded the existing distributors. Darshan’s father had an extremely good relationship with the team members who had left Kwality, who encouraged him to start manufacturing on his own, helping him with machinery and know-how. Thus Darshan Milk Food Products was born, concentrating on ice-cream and kulfis. Their USP was that they only used fresh cream and natural flavouring and no vegetable oils.

As a young girl, Darshan never wanted to join the family business. “I hated that my parents made ice-cream. We never got a proper family vacation. When we had our summer vacation, my parents would be busy with their season time. During Diwali and Christmas vacations, my parents were busy with the marriage season. Even at the dinner table, my parents would only discuss the ice-cream factory.”

Darshan’s mother always dreamed of her becoming a doctor and so she took up Science in college. After her 12th Boards, she began helping her father in the factory. Darshan started taking a liking to the line so much so that a week before her CET exams, she sold all her 12th standard books and went away to Sidhbari to study the Bhagvad Gita! That’s how she skipped her CET entrance exam and ventured into a Bachelor’s in Management Studies (BMS) instead.

Post her graduation, Darshan interned with Zee News who offered her a job in Zee Business. Her father saw her slogging for 15-16 hours for peanuts so he offered her a job at his factory. But six months later she married her sweetheart, Kshitij Kulkarni, and left for Dubai. Two months later, she realised that the time spent at her father’s office was the most productive of her life and decided to return. Her friend offered her a consultant position with their organic A2 milk supply brand Praakritik. Seeing Darshan work for Praakritik, her father realised that she had a lot more potential than he had thought and offered her a partnership in the business.

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Starting with International Women’s Day in March, THE TEENAGER TODAY has been bringing you a series on women entrepreneurs, ‘Women Mean Business’. Each article introduces our readers to an inspiring woman entrepreneur or professional, insights into what shaped them and their experience of entrepreneurship.

With the rains almost here, already wistful visions of cool showers, wet greenery and sloshing about in puddles crowd the mind. And the one image that completes this entire pastiche is that of curling up with a hot cuppa tea!

India and tea have been synonymous since time immemorial. An Indian morning without that steaming hot brew is unimaginable as is that evening ritual with a cup of the best and snacks. But flavoured teas? This has not really been a part of the Indian landscape and more an ‘imported foreign’ experience.

Enter Amareen Khuraana, a diminutive lady with a gigantic vision — converting India into a nation of flavoured tea connoisseurs! Amareen, with her brand Brewlette, has been redefining how Indians prefer their favourite brew for the past few years now. As she puts it, “Even on the worst day, a cup of tea can turn it around. You may not be able to buy happiness but can surely brew happiness!”

Amareen comes from a family of entrepreneurs; her father owns a chain of restaurant, hotel and superstore in Mussoorie, her brother has his own venture called ‘Kullcha King’ and her mother is a noted numerologist and Vaastu consultant. Amareen says that she has inherited her impeccable work ethic from her father from whom she learnt the true essence of sportsmanship, teamwork and the rewards of hard work and dedication. From her mother, Amareen picked up her academic focus, the confidence to perform on stage and build her outgoing personality through extra-curricular activities.

Whilst in college, Amareen worked with actress-entrepreneur Sushmita Sen at the ‘I am She, Miss Universe India’ pageant as a contestant manager. After graduation, she worked with Mahesh Bhupathi’s sports, talent and celebrity management company, Globosport, for a year and then pursued her Masters in Management and Marketing at Birmingham City University (U.K.). She represented 15,000 students across 7 campuses and worked at the students’ union, also topping her course among 2,000 students across the management, marketing and HR streams in the process! Once she returned home, she worked at ad agency TBWA India before giving in to her entrepreneurial calling and starting Brewlette.

Amareen truly loved tea even as a teenager but it was in the U.K. that she was exposed to the world of flavoured teas. Being on a campus with students from across the world, Amareen was exposed to unique flavours and blends from virtually every corner of the globe — apple, cranberry, pear, jasmine, pineapple, grapefruit and many others! Her addiction to teas only grew here, so much that she came to be referred to as ‘the exotic tea girl’! An incident that underscores her obsession with teas took place at the airport when she was returning to India. She had excess baggage what with the tons of tea samples she was carrying with her. She chose to dump her clothes and return with her suitcases crammed with the teas of the world!

During her stint with TBWA, Amareen studied the Indian tea market and realized that there was a huge market gap in flavoured teas. India is one of the world’s leading exporters of traditional tea but is not known for the production or consumption of flavoured teas except for the ubiquitous ‘masala tea’. The market leaders in this segment are the U.K., Japan and Sri Lanka. The original business plan for Brewlette was actually etched out on a tissue and arose out of a conversation with a friend at a Domino’s Pizza outlet in Mumbai!

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Starting with International Women’s Day last month, The Teenager Today has been bringing you a series on women entrepreneurs, ‘Women Mean Business’. Each article will introduce to our readers an inspiring woman entrepreneur or professional and give us an insight into what shaped them and their experience of entrepreneurship.

Since time immemorial, man has looked to the skies for inspiration. In this issue we meet one such wonder woman, whose quest for adventure made her reach for the skies, literally and figuratively!

Meet Leena Juvekar Duttagupta, entrepreneur and partner in Adonis Aviation Enterprises, an integrated aviation company in the business of providing aviation charter services pan India and overseas.

Adonis Aviation’s services cover a wide spectrum right from executive and business charters, aircraft for product launches and promotional events, film shoots, sports charters as well as for aerial surveys to medical evacuation! Their fleet of flying machines include executive business jets, turbo propeller aircraft, helicopters and drones. They also provide sales and purchase as well as organize aviation-related permissions making them a one-stop solution for clients’ flying needs. The aircrafts are flown by the most experienced pilots and are maintained by a professional engineering staff with flight safety and good engineering practices as the main objective.

India aims to become the third-largest aviation market by 2020 and the largest by 2030. Today, affluent individuals, VIPs and corporates are increasingly turning to private charter services for their travel needs due to the flexibility that such services offer at a comparatively reasonable cost.

This is the story of a woman entrepreneur who stormed this male-dominated field and is now recognised as one of the premier aviation service providers in the country.

Leena was a typical school-going child when, at the age of 7, her life changed dramatically. Her father met with an accident at the mill where he was working. He was bedridden for a year, and received no compensation from the company. Somehow they pulled through this difficult period, but a few years later when union problems erupted at the mill, things became tough once again.

Leena’s mother took on odd jobs like cooking, selling vegetables and sarees and picking up and dropping children from school to support the family. Leena helped in whatever way she could at her tender age. When she reached the 9th standard, she took up part-time jobs. She completed her graduation in Arts but chose not to study further due to financial constraints. To add to the pressure, her father’s mill closed down and, since both her younger sister and brother were studying, Leena joined hands with her mother to take on the responsibility for the family’s needs.

Aviation had always been Leena’s passion and she convinced her father’s friend, who ran an aircraft Maintenance & Repair Organisation (MRO), to give her a job, thus beginning her journey in this sector. Her salary of Rs 1,750 per month was not enough to support her family, and so she simultaneously took up tuitions for students to augment her income.

Leena thereafter worked in seven different aviation companies in different departments, thus gaining the knowledge she would need to set up her own business. In 2011, Leena and her brother Rahul started their partnership aviation company, Adonis Aviation, with barely Rs 60,000 as seed funding.

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Starting with International Women’s Day last month, The Teenager Today has been bringing you a series on women entrepreneurs, ‘Women Mean Business’. Each article will introduce to our readers an inspiring woman entrepreneur or professional and give us an insight into what shaped them and their experience of entrepreneurship.

India has long been known for its glorious traditions in textiles and fabric design. And among its most loved are its handloom creations. Alas, these works of art, painstakingly crafted by hand, are seeing a slow death, taken over by power looms and modern automated processes, thus putting at risk the livelihood of these traditional weavers.

Enter Mrunmayi Avachat, a fashion designer and entrepreneur who took it upon herself to revive the dying handloom industry and ensure that weavers were given a fair deal.

Mrunmayi grew up in Nashik where she completed her education in the science stream. Her father is an architect and her mother owned a small tailoring workshop, both of whose skills are beautifully woven into what Mrunmayi chose as a career later on.

Mrunmayi was drawn to art forms at an early age, participating in and winning numerous inter-school drawing competitions and also being trained in Kathak under Guru Rekha Nadgauda, under whose tutelage she performed on stage and even won a prize at the all-India level. Right through childhood, she was greatly influenced by personalities who came from smaller towns and made it big. She used to read about designers and how the fashion industry was shaping up as a formidable sector in India and this instilled in her a desire to contribute to this growth story.

Fashion design was not considered a wise decision back then given its association with glamour and hence a most definite no-no for academically bright students. However, Mrunmayi chose to follow her heart and study fashion designing at the PV Polytechnic of SNDT, Juhu. Fashion greats such as Neeta Lulla, Hemant Trivedi, Wendell Rodricks and Priyadarshani Rao were her teachers, and doyens of the fashion world such as Manish Malhotra, Meher Castelino, Sabira Merchant, etc., mentored the students. In their graduating collection displayed at a fashion show sponsored by Femina with professional models walking the ramp, Mrunmayi’s collection won the award for the best outfit of the year! A placement with a fashion house followed immediately and Mrunmayi’s professional career took off. Luckily, all her jobs from then on required her to take decisions on product development and that gave her the confidence to launch off on her own a few years later.

While working with Walt Disney as Creative Head, Disney Consumer Products (Fashion), Mrunmayi felt that there was so much more in product development that she could do which was not possible in her corporate job profile. She had always had an inclination towards ethnic wear and hand embroideries. So, with her friend Nikita, she decided to explore some art and crafts and adapt them to more urban wear outfits. They started with the phulkari embroidery of Punjab and to preserve the authenticity, sourced it from village women near Patiala. They thought of giving a name to their creations and came up with NIKAYI which means ’A small (rare) collection’ in the ancient Pali language. Additionally, it also had their names (NIK – Nikita & AYI – Mrunmayi) in it and they started selling under the label. It was fun and they created a small range which got a welcome response from people and got sold instantly among their friends and colleagues.

Mrunmayi and Nikita then went to Madhya Pradesh and met some handloom weavers. This trip changed their lives. They realized that the younger generation in the weavers’ families were not interested in weaving. Most had taken up odd jobs and migrated to cities to make their living. It hit the duo hard; they realized if this continued our children would never ever see handloom products in their lifetime.

They also discovered other facets to the weavers’ existence — that they were not paid well, that they lacked sophistication in their techniques and that it included a lot of manual hard work which the meagre remuneration they received for the same simply did not justify.

NIKAYI began working with a few top weavers to make fabrics/sarees and dupattas to suit urban preferences.

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A couple of months ago, Manushi Chillar was the toast of the nation, indeed the world, as she confidently won the Miss World title in China. However, what many do not know is that the person behind the confidence and poise and, indeed, Manushi’s life-view, was a diminutive young lady by the name of Nidhika Bahl.

Nidhika hails from a middle-class family of entrepreneurs and was born and brought up in Delhi. After securing a B.Com. (Hons) degree from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Nidhika went on to do an M.Sc. in Finance from Lancaster University (UK). Over the next 7 years, Nidhika held positions in companies across the U.S., U.K. and India.

Finance and numbers came easily to Nidhika; however, that did not mean that a lifetime spent in doing just that held great attraction for her. She decided to take a sabbatical and joined a popular theatre group called ‘Ank’, spending the next two years doing theatre. It was at the end of this period that she was picked up by Marching Ants Advertising Pvt Ltd. as a freelance Creative Director.

In 2005, Nidhika moved to Mumbai with her husband. Her family had always encouraged her to start out on her own and in 2006, Nidhika set up Parallel Circles Entertainment, a media firm. As the founder and creative director of PCE, she had the privilege of working with some of the best names in the corporate world such as P&G, Gillette, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Akzo Nobel, CRY Shiksha, ZOYA by Tata and many more.

However, not all was well on her personal front. Nidhika’s marriage was failing and this had a tremendous impact on her health and self-esteem. In 2008, she was diagnosed with major clinical depression which even caused her to make two unsuccessful attempts to take her life. Thus began a long journey with several doctors and specialists — she had to undergo sedation three times a day and therapy three times a week! This lasted for six long years. In the midst of this, Nidhika and her husband decided to separate.

Nidhika feels that what aggravated her condition was her playing ‘the victim’, blaming the world for what was happening to her and looking for solutions outside and trying to change others instead of looking into herself. One day, after almost 4 years of treatment and medication had caused other innumerable related health issues she was introduced by a friend to a multi-level health products company. These products helped her a great deal and she was invited to share her success stories with the group.

This early success made Nidhika determined to bounce back from this situation in her life. It took her six long years of relentless determination and undying faith in herself to deal with all that life threw at her during that period. She started meeting inspirational people and got addicted to reading, especially self-help books. She read nearly 300 books, and this addiction to reading slowly reduced her dependence on medication. One day, she came upon a book that changed her life forever — Joyce Meyer’s The Battlefield of the Mind.

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