At Brilliant Read Media, we always strive to bring you meaningful and powerful stories from India and around the world to empower and motivate our growing community of investors, management students and aspiring entrepreneurs. This week we invited Yoshita Gupta for an interview with us. Yoshita is a Leader, Entrepreneur, Associate Founder and Head-Customer Communications at You And Gifts. Let’s learn more about her inspiring journey, her way forward and her advice for our growing community!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Yoshita:
We are aware of your contribution to the ecosystem, talk us through your background and your journey as a women entrepreneur, please;
I did my schooling from Delhi, further completed my Engineering from UP and later did my Masters in Banking and Finance.
I have always been passionate to deliver high performance in all walks of life. I was always a bright student. I was never afraid of anything new coming in my way and I never had a fear of learning something new.”
More than a decade of my career has been spent in maintaining healthy relations with the clients and customers. To my understanding, Employees and the customers, form the strongest pillars of any organization.
I worked as a banking professional for about 7 years and as a Marketing head in a company for a year. My son had sensitive health when he was born, due to which I had to leave my job and had to be at home for most of the time.
This gave me time to work towards my passion and dream of doing something of my own.
With this thought in mind, I successfully established You and Gifts (www.youandgifts.com), an E-commerce platform for kids gifting products, which is under the registered name of Om Tathastu.”
What attracts you towards entrepreneurship instead of a corporate career?
I chose entrepreneurship because I always wanted to make an impact. I have always been intrigued by entrepreneurship and read success stories of all the successful entrepreneurs.”
You see – It’s fascinating how you build something from the scratch to build an empire around it and not everyone can do it. It takes a lot of courage, planning, perseverance, hard work, teamwork, combined with good strategy & execution skills.
I always wanted to come out of the safe and secured corporate environment. The time that I had when I was at home, made me analyze the spark of being an entrepreneur.
‘You And Gifts’ is such a unique name; talk us through more about it, please. Our audience would also love to know what kind of problem you are solving?
While choosing the name of the company, we always wanted to keep it simple. Simple for the people to remember and recall. We also wanted that people should relate to the name and could understand, that what the company is all about.
Have kids engaged, learn and play, is the most difficult task for the parents these days. As a parent, while planning the birthday of our kids, we have to go out, look for stuff, or visit various platforms online, to have the best celebration. We wish to be a single platform for the parents, for all their gifting and party celebration requirements.
During this COVID-19 crisis, what are the measures you have undertaken to continue your business without disruption?
As the business is born just a couple of months before COVID, each measure is taken to ensure that the model aligns with challenges of the pandemic.
When dealing with the most sensitive customers, you have to be overcautious.
We make sure that all the products are sanitized and then packed in the sanitized environment. To ensure proper sanitization we have limited staff access for packaging the products.
Knowing the fact the delivery of orders might take time, during the lockdown, we made sure, that our team, gets in touch with all the customers who placed their orders, to ensure the delivery.
How do you manage yourself and keep on going despite the challenges? What drives you?
When you are a startup, and there is no face to face dealings with the customers, achieving the trust factor becomes very important. You need to have a team, who value their commitments and make sure that the customer could trust you. I have spent a lot of time in the service industry.
To overcome the challenge of making the customer trust our platform. Initially, I took the responsibility of handling all the customer queries. Later the team took over the task efficiently in the same manner. Procuring best products, timely packaging, keeping the track of the orders dispatched, Prompt action taken for delayed deliveries, taking regular customer feedback, I always try to make sure that I empower the right people for the right work.”
This way I do not feel overburdened with work that leads to stress. In my free time, I try to read books, spend time with my family, and try to maintain my work-life balance as much as possible. Reading books have always helped me to remain stress-free.
I would say that my motivation factor is my husband, who is always there to help me and my son, who makes me smile during the toughest days.
What are the three most important lessons you have learned building your startup?
1 – Failing is not important, learning from the failures is.
2 – Make mistakes. They give you experiences.
3 – In your journey, there will be a lot of people who would not support you. Keep hold of the ones, who do.
In your opinion – what is more necessary: Idea or a good team for a successful startup?
In my opinion, it should be a mix of both. You just cannot go ahead with an idea jotted down on a piece of paper without like-minded people working on it. A good idea will get more people to work on that idea. A good team will take that idea forward.
Please share with us – what has worked well for you so far?
One thing I would say that helped me and my company grow is the ability to listen to our customers.
We believe that customers are not interested in products but in getting their problems resolved. We interact as humans and not as machines.
We work on every single feedback given to us.
The more we listen to them, the better we become as a business.
You are always positive and motivated, what keeps you going?
I love my work and when your passion becomes your work, you don’t get tired. There are days, which go without any sleep, but you still feel fresh and enjoy everything.
I enjoy each and every bit of my work. The reviews that we receive and the feedback that we get from the customers make us feel that we have achieved something good.
We would love to know your advice for all those starting out as an aspiring women entrepreneur?
Fail, fall but don’t stop. It might seem difficult, but when you have the spark in you, the sky is all yours.
BrilliantRead is committed to bringing stories from the startup ecosystem, stories that reshape our perspective, add value to our community and be a constant source of motivation not just for our community but also for the whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs and aspiring individuals.
Note: If you have a similar story to share with our audience and would like to be featured on our online magazine, then please write to us at [email protected], we will review your story and extend an invitation to feature if it is worth publishing.
