In 2018, I started a brand called “Gashena”. It was a brand that sold Korean Fashion for women in India.

I was working in advertising then and was already involved in creating and launching multiple brands for clients. Starting my own brand did not occur to me overnight. It started to take shape as I delved deeper and became more involved with this field. But I also knew that with online shopping steadily gaining pace in India, I would have to offer a niche. Around that time, my partner was intent on convincing me to like K-pop. And during our conversations, she mentioned the lack of Korean fashion clothing in India. Having lived in a region of the country where Korean pop culture had a significant influence on the youth, I decided that this was something worth exploring.

I had no knowledge of the garment industry nor any formal business experience, but I decided to take the leap & figure it out as it went. Thus, “Gashena” was born. The name was short and catchy, it was a lingo that meant ‘young woman’ and consumers of K-pop would recognize its reference to a popular K-pop song released in 2017. We curated clothes through a process of trial and error. And luckily for us, some worked.

(Spoiler Alert: We didn’t end up becoming fashion moguls.)

Here’s What I Learned:

Know what you’re good at & what you suck at!

When we started out, I knew I was good at branding, creative direction, web design, a little bit of development, and making things look pretty overall. But I sucked at styling clothes, trending fashion, and women’s clothes in general.

So my partner took over the copywriting, product selection & managing social media. As a K-pop fan and an avid window shopper, it was something she enjoyed doing.

We were very clear about what we were good at and stuck to it. Within 2 weeks of conceptualizing “Gashena”, we launched it. If you don’t have a partner whose niche matches yours, figure out where you suck at and delegate it; you don’t have to do everything by yourself!

You have to be in charge of EVERYTHING

As a small-scale entrepreneur, one difficult lesson I learned was that you have to handle everything by yourself!

I had my hand in everything- from design, development, sourcing, operations, accounting, customer service & even a few times, being the delivery person.

That being said, if you find someone that you trust to delegate your work to, it works perfectly fine. But you will need still to oversee everything, not in-depth, but from an overview.

The goal isn’t perfection, but something that works.

Solve a problem

You may have a good product, but it doesn’t always matter to people.

What matters is if you are solving a problem they are facing or if your product fills a market need.

Luckily, we happened to start it when the K-content boom was steadily picking up pace across the country. So, people were looking for and were interested in what we were offering.

Focus on not a ‘nice-to-have’, but a ‘need-to-have’. That is when you will see the real traction.

Marketing doesn’t guarantee sales

We were doing well, perhaps not great but enough to sustain cost. We had done a few high-profile influencer collaborations, one of which was featured in the magazine, Cosmopolitan India.

We were successful in driving people to our website and social media platforms, but to convert those people into paying customers, we still needed to figure out what it was that the customers were looking for. We were still experimenting with the products; some were a success while some, were not so. Since the whole business was self-funded, there were definitely limitations in how much we could experiment. So even though we could bring a considerable amount of traffic, we couldn’t offer the exact products that the audience was looking for.

We figured out that if the product is good enough, customers will even do the marketing for YOU, by spreading the word. And that kind of marketing is FREE, which I was able to achieve with this new venture. (P.s Will link it in the coming future)

Passion is key

You have to have passion for the thing you’re doing. Otherwise, it becomes tedious and discouraging. It’s a passion that’ll keep you invested in the long haul.

I’ve wanted to shut the brand even though it was tough doing all the work, staying awake late hours responding to customers, and seeing no returns. Even though currently the brand is on hiatus, I am still passionate about it and will restart it again in the near future.

Go on, start something!

Yeah, we didn’t become millionaires, but we loved every bit of this experience. We learned a lot & had I not taken the leap, I would have missed out on all those lessons.

I applied everything I learned to the next fashion brand that I launched for a Korean Company and scaled it to a 1500% growth within the second year of launch. You can read about it here!
(P.s Will link it in the coming future)

Bottom line is, go Start Something. Research, plan it out, and start carefully. Yes, it may fail. That’s okay. Learn what worked, and what did not, and try again.

I wish you luck.