Monday 22 August 2011

AyurSens story

Many of us dream big dreams, think lofty thoughts, but it’s always challenging to translate them into reality. This article is about how it all came together for me, for AyurSens..

AyurSens was always meant to be! For as long as I can remember, I dabbled in homemade herbal beauty both for my personal use and as a side business for my family. As you can imagine, I grew up in a home that was surrounded with the sights and smells of herbs and flowers. During my high school and college, I was supplementing my pocket money by running a small business, making soaps in our kitchen and selling them to my friends. 

It surprises me now, that despite all this early familiarity with herbal beauty, my education was taking me on a different path. I studied the culinary arts for 3 years at the Institute of Hotel Management. On completion of this course, I felt the need to augment my education by training as a Human Resources consultant. My idea at that time was to open up my own restaurant. With no one willing to invest in a rookie like me, I found myself searching for a job.

I landed a job in the global services industry and in time found myself working on international projects. This led to a spate of assignments that had me travelling to the far corners of USA and Canada, living out of my suitcase for months on end. One of the benefits of consulting work, if there is a silver lining to that cloud, is the amount of time you get to doodle on paper napkins at airports. Over the course of these years, the desire to build my own business, embracing cool new tools for productivity enhancement and leveraging an increasingly accessible global supply chain, became a fascination. It was the stuff of my mile high jet lagged dreams and many crumpled napkins.

It still amazes me how long it took me to figure out that I had been carrying my business with me in my hand bag all along; the herbal goodies that customs officers so enjoyed smelling! Thankfully, I managed to connect these dots of my aspirational dream business with the time tested home grown theme of herbal beauty, and AyurSens was born.

AyurSens could have as easily slipped into oblivion, like a shooting star, had it not been for my family. My Dad with his banking background is a financial guru, who knew what it took to make a sustainable business out of this idea. And my mother knew how to keep me from becoming a pest when my impatience threatened to overpower me. And of course, no boxes would have been lifted had it not been for my younger brother, who is an extremely supportive workaholic, a fortunate condition that I fully exploit. When people think about startups in North America, they think friends and class mates, and invariably everyone in their newco is at the same level of inexperience. Not so for me. I count myself as extremely lucky to have found the wisdom, the support and the financial backing all in one place, my family. I can proudly say that my family has been the wind beneath AyurSens wings.

We are blessed with an amazing team mostly based in rural India that is proud to call AyurSens their company. This article would be incomplete, if I did not mention our loyal customers, who gave us our initial break, who took a chance on us when we were an unknown entity. To them, I convey the AyurSens promise to never disappoint. We will continue to experiment and craft new and exciting products that remain true to our five core values ‘panchtantra’.

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