Author(s): Reema Khurana and Rakesh Gupta
The present research explores digital entrepreneurship using a Qualitative case-based study of the company Sthree Creatives. Sthree Creatives was an online company founded by Shree Mathy Mohan. Sthree Creatives specialized in selling ethnic, handloom-based sarees and dress material. They also sold hand-crafted jewelry. Shree Mathy was a qualified insurance and management professional. She had worked in corporate for twenty-five years before taking a plunge into the digital handloom business. She chose the business when there was a clear opportunity in the digital domain to set up an authentic handloom-based business. She was curating and designing the products in collaboration with the weavers. The business was even more unique as the woman was doing it for the women. Shree Mathy insisted that since she was used to saree draping and the usage of Indian authentic jewelry across generations in her family, she was the best judge of the fabric, design, and accessories. This was evident in the designs she showcased on her website. The business was completely digital and had a remarkable presence on social media. Shree Mathy regularly posted her forays into the experimentation of intra-country cross-cultural design experimentation. However, the business catered to only a niche set of customers and sourced the material from only a few weavers. Thus, Sthree Mathy had been able to grow the business to a revenue of USD 200,000 after 3 years of establishment. She was apparently caught in a vicious cycle of small business enterprises with low input and low-scale output. Shree Mathy faced the dilemma of how to break out of this small business paradigm and keep the business sustainable. She was unable to decide whether she should use family money, take a bank loan or raise a round of funding as all options had their gaps. The implications of this case-based study, are to discuss - the dilemma facing female SME entrepreneurs, whether to stay small or scale up the business; e-business can be used to build traditional businesses, the challenge of scaling up an entrepreneurial venture in handlooms, understand the trade-off between staying small and scaling an entrepreneurial venture.