Women Entrepreneurship Day 2022: 6 Self-Made Women Entrepreneurs In India Whose Journey Will Inspire You

On this Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, let’s celebrate these six women entrepreneur and leaders across various industries that are changing the rules of the game through their own ventures. Let’s look at their fascinating and inspiring journey.

Today women are at the forefront of development. From space to corporate board room, women are taking centre stage everywhere. Entrepreneurship, which has long been men’s territory, is now rapidly changing. Today women in India are charting their own paths in the entrepreneurial space starting their own enterprise, their own start-ups, raising funds and heading their own enterprise.

This Women Entrepreneurship Day, let’s look at some of these women who dared to follow their heart, challenged the status quo and making their mark in their respective industries.

Anjali Balan

Anjali Balan is the founder and CEO of Svech. Svech sells Yoga Mat and Yoga accessories through their official e-commerce portal. Anjali studied law from Nalsar University of Law but she always wanted to be an entrepreneur from her early days.
Anjali is an avid Yoga practitioner. One day while practicing her daily Yoga routine, the idea of the brand came to her. She wanted to replace her Yoga mat but the options available in the market were either plastic mats which are harmful to the environment or sustainable mats which are way too costly. She realized that there is lack of affordable, eco-friendly, long lasting Yoga mat in the Indian market. So, she decided to find her own venture to fill this need-gap in the market.

As a CEO, Anjali handles all aspects of the brand from finance, marketing to day-to-day operations. Svech is Anjali’s brainchild where she has been involved in all aspects of the brand from creating the product prototype, testing to the final products itself. Through Svech, she is bringing an eco-friendly product that is not only safe for everyone, helps everyone to do their Yoga or workout but is affordable for all. Apart from their official website, the brand is also present in leading e-commerce portals like Amazon, Cred app etc.

Baruni Verma

Baruni Verma is the founder of minimalist jewelry brand Starkle. An alumna of University of Cambridge and University College London, Baruni is currently CEO of Starkle. From product design and development, process sourcing, branding, content creation, marketing, supply chain management to inventory and logistics management, she has an extensive experience and looks after all aspects of the brand.

It was an acute frustration with the market offerings of jewelry that led to the creation of Starkle. She looked and the market offering and saw that artificial jewelry pieces would tarnish quickly and would have to be discarded which can feel like a waste of money. Gold and diamond pieces made by traditional jewelers had outdated and no longer connected to the new set of consumers. On the other hand, pleasing and ostentatious designs were highly overpriced. Frustrated with the market offering, she set out to create a fine jewelry brand that would appeal to the young generation with exceptional design and pieces that are trendy and would suit a variety of budgets and have resale value.

Starkle currently creates; every day affordable jewelry made from hallmarked gold and certified natural diamonds and is targeted to consumers around aged 21-40. Apart from their online presence, Starkle also has two retail outlets in New Delhi and Mumbai. A strong follower of a minimalistic lifestyle herself, her aim with Starkle is to introduce other young individuals to aesthetically pleasing and non-ostentatious fine jewelry.

Meenu Bhatia

Meenu is the Co-Founder of VMentor.ai, an organization that works with organizations and helps them deliver superior shareholder value and achieve 10X business growth through tech driven, human intervened platform and interventions.

Meenu also leads YUGMA – the campus – corporate engagement initiative under VMentor.ai that works with Business and Graduate schools helping enhance employability and building a pipeline of talent for organizations. Prior to her entrepreneurship journey, Meenu has worked with organizations such as Piramal Group, Godrej Group and CHEP India among others in her corporate stint of 16 years and has led several HR Transformation initiatives across India, USA, Europe and South East Asia.

Meenu is a certified Leadership coach, Accredited by International Coaching Federation and works with CXOs on team performance, building a culture, leadership, leading with empathy and more. She holds a Post Graduate Degree in Human Resources. She is also certified in Design Thinking, Neuro Linguistic Programing, and MBTI that helps her to bring out the innate potential and gifts of her clients and people in educational institutions and organizations.

Neha Juneja

Neha Juneja, along with Ravinder Voomidi Singh and Mohit Gupta started IndiaP2P.com, an organization that offers high-yield investment products composed of curated retail loans. IndiaP2P.com is a new, technology-first investment platform for high-yield fixed income investments designed for retail investors.

She is a seasoned entrepreneur having previously Co-founded & scaled Greenway – world’s largest clean cooking enterprise with operations across India and sub-Saharan Africa where she developed multiple credit partnerships with Banks, MFIs and NBFCs focused on women as borrowers. Prior to Greenway, she set up India’s first consumer facing derivatives trading platform designed for retail investors.

She holds an Industrial Engineer degree from Delhi College of Engineering and an MBA from Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi. She is an Echoing Green fellow and has won several entrepreneurship awards such as the Business world Young Entrepreneur Award, L’Oreal – Femina Award for Science and Innovation, Intel Global Award, Ashden Award and more.

Through IndiaP2P.com, her vision is to make productive investments offering high returns accessible to everyone in India and to enable wealth generation for investors of all sizes while contributing constructively to economic growth of the nation.

Sannjana Raghu Amberkar

Sannjana Raghu Amberkar is the Co-Founder of PHASES. She along with her husband has been working on the brand –researching and testing since January 2021. Sannjana has always been interested in skincare and natural remedies to treat skincare woes. But the idea for PHASES came to her when she went searching for skincare products suitable for her teenage daughter. Most of the solution available in the market was laden with chemicals and were not suitable for her daughter. As a mother, she realized that the issue she is facing is faced by millions of mothers in India who want to find the safe skincare for their teenage children. That’s when she decided to start her own skincare venture and solve the problem.

Sannjana has always been a passionate advocate of natural remedies for skin woes. She has a diploma in natural skincare from School of Natural Skincare and a certificate in anti-aging from formula botanica. She also holds an MBA degree. She was born in Sirsi, Karnataka.

PHASES is committed to the environment. They are a plastic neutral brand. They have partnered with recircle and recycle more plastic than they would use and are on a tree plantation mission to contribute towards building a greener planet.

Sujata Sharda

Not all start-ups are started in garage, some are started in kitchen to an in-house manufacturing unit in Rajasthan. Meet Sujata Sharda, a homemaker, a mother of two, social activist and founder of Mellow that she started from her own kitchen. Mellow is an Ayurvedic skincare brand that brings together the best of Ayurveda and the goodness of Mother Nature. The brand has their own ecommerce site & they are also present on leading e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Amazon UAE & US, Flipkart, Vanity Wagon, Sustain Kart, Try Kiya.

Sujata started the brand from scratch, and used to manufacture, package and label the entire product line on her own in the start-up years. From there, she nurtured, cultivated and grew the brand over the years. Sujata is involved in every aspect of the brand from research, manufacturing to packaging.

She has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and just keeps reading, researching and looking for new information, research and recent developments in the field of Ayurveda, naturopathy and herbal experts- to find solutions to problems faced by modern men and women. She is the driving force behind all the product development and R&D of the brand.

Sujata’s vision is to make Ayurveda accessible – to bring the best and purest Ayurvedic products at an affordable price for everybody. Beside Mellow, she is a strong proponent of social causes specially education and medical facility for the deprived people. She runs a social self-help group in her hometown in Haryana, where women from backward classes, slum areas are given vocational training to support themselves financially.

Article Credits: Business World