Coronavirus impact: Reinventing traditional business from the living room

Entrepreneurs from traditional business communities in the country are using their time in lockdown to embrace change ahead of an imminent recession

Ubai Lokhandwala, a retailer and wholesaler of soft furnishings in Surat, had never really felt the need for a website before now. Started in 1999, his Furnishing Centre drew from his family’s 150-year-old history of making curtains and table cloths. The store in Zampa Bazar relied on walk-ins. When the lockdown began, like all entrepreneurs in categories not deemed essential, for some days the veteran entrepreneur was forced to stay put and twiddle his thumbs. “I was concerned not just for myself, but for the entire community. How would we manage cash and business?”

Over the last two weeks however, the mood in the house has perked up, and Lokhandwala and his architect son Husain have been dreaming up ways to spruce up the venture’s “very traditional approach”. They pooled photographs of products from their phones and created pages for the business on Google. They intend to get on Amazon next. When the city reopens, they have decided Husain will help offer a decorating and refurbishing service to customers with the company’s affordable soft furnishings. The export side of their work, thus far in limited focus, will also become more important with plans to sell stitched drapes to the United States and nations in Africa.

Lokhandwala belongs to the one-million strong Dawoodi Bohra community, majority of whom are industrious, well-to-do, and involved in trade mainly in western India or in the United States, United Kingdom, Africa and West Asia. The urbane community has an official business department, called Al-Tijaarat al-Raabehah, which looks to boost the wealth of its people. In response to the challenges the pandemic was throwing at members, who run start-ups and small and large enterprises, the department launched what it calls a “business war room”. It is a virtual room, where counsellors and consultants use webinars or one-on-one calls to intervene and take the spanner out of the works of Bohra undertakings.

The war room has been hosting live seminars daily — bilingual in English and Gujarati — to show that isolation can be an opportunity to consider things that were ignored while busy in the shop. It was through consultation calls that Lokhandwala was advised to examine new areas of growth such as digital marketing. So far, there have been half a dozen webinars for the community at large, which are being adapted by the department’s 55 committees worldwide to address more localised anxieties. Changes, both temporary and permanent, are afoot. One member in Surat was inspired by suggestions to set up a grocery delivery service within 10 days, says the department’s business lead Huzaifa Mukarram. An IT and network equipment dealer is said to have stepped into a related category — offering home office packages to people who need them for functioning from the residence.

A few of India’s traditional business communities have been talking among themselves to figure out ways to manage current worries as well as brace for a future where recession is imminent. They may not have all the solutions but Mukarram’s team is helping traders make the most of the time available to them by budgeting for the next year and drawing business plans for the next three years. A seminar on “the importance of soft skills in business” may strike one as rather obvious but it has reminded solo entrepreneurs who otherwise juggle competing priorities, to review such matters.

Dawoodi Bohra businessman attending webinar

 

For some years now, Jumana Abedin has been designing and selling customary Bohra clothing — jhabla izars, worn by children typically up to the age of 12, and ridas, a two-piece garment for women, patterned with unicorns, flowers, even cups of tea —online and through Instagram. Her AZ Creations has always operated from home, but after the restrictions on movement affected raw material supplies, work came to a standstill. Attending a webinar where prominent Bohra women entrepreneur groups shared their stories “helped to know that I am not the only one struggling.”

Stoked by a sense of sisterhood, Abedin says she is taking pen to paper again and thinking up new motifs for her creations. Interacting with more experienced business owners revealed “it is not just about creativity and marketing but also how you interact with customers.” She reserves some hours daily now for networking with potential customers and existing ones. She is also using her resources to “financially and emotionally” help out the local karigars (craftsmen) who collaborate with her, because they are worse hit by this period of unemployment.

In putting their heads together to find answers, the Dawoodi Bohras are in the company of other enterprising communities. Nearly 70 per cent of Sindhis are said to be entrepreneurs, some of whom set up a Sindhi Chamber of Commerce in Mumbai to bring more professionalism to community’s traditional, family-owned businesses. Organising half a dozen talks on the web for members after the lockdown have given the group’s founder and president, Bharat Ajwani, a sense of the varied troubles they are grappling with at the moment. “The government is mandating not to lay off people or cut salaries but most micro, small and medium enterprise owners cannot afford this,” he says. “Also, with a significant migrant workforce shifting base, one may not find the required labour force when the lockdown is lifted.” Competing for raw material and logistics will be their other worries.

Among the learning sessions held was a discussion about the impact of goods and services tax on certain sectors, tips to maximise benefits from LinkedIn features, and tips to nourish mental and physical health through the pandemic. Legal and finance professionals in the group are helping members invoke force majeure clauses and renegotiate agreements. Interestingly, not all its members are facing bad times. As the managing director of Tecnik Fluid Controls, which makes engineering products for pharmaceutical companies, Ajwani sees an opportunity in ramping up manufacturing. Given the remarkable shifts in corporate functioning, another member, Navin Sadarangani, has experienced increasing demand for his business coaching service. 

Various companies want him to talk about methods for team building and other strategies via Zoom and Whatsapp.

The community is known for running academic institutions. Akhil Shahani, who heads several education committees and trusts, notes that colleges in his group have adapted to online classes quite seamlessly during the lockdown. “This has forced faculty and students who had a mental block to online education to change their mindsets. So we have decided to accelerate plans for offering pure online courses in the long term.” One inventive pivot in the group has been of a small technology company in the garments industry which has started manufacturing masks.

Although only a couple of weeks old, these intra-community attempts to enliven businesses during the ongoing lockdown are evolving. Al-Tijaarat al-Raabehah’s sessions, which had just one person talking into a camera initially, has moved to an interview format with real-time opinion polls and interactive videos. The groups are tutoring less tech-proficient members on how to use applications like Zoom or WebinarJam. Business owners of the Sindhi Chamber of Commerce report that while 20 to 40 per cent of their company workforce — usually the top and middle management — use online tools to engage, the rest rely only on telephone connectivity. Some will add improvements to employees’ readiness to work from home in post-lockdown business plans.

In the southern part of the country, the Chettiars have been brainstorming too. Believed to have introduced organised banking in the country, the community’s interests have expanded into construction, trade, retail, and software. While the Nagarathar Chamber of Commerce’s live meetings in Chennai and Madurai would attract attendance of about 50 members, it has seen about 300 people logging in for online sessions launched last month. For specific requests, it has been counselling members over the phone on issues such as on how to source passes for deliveries, or cut unwanted costs, or apply social distancing norms in their shop spaces.

Over the course of these meetings, members are realising that they should have more than one source of fixed income to rely on, with emergency funds and smaller supplementary businesses. Avenues like pharmaceuticals and medical equipment are appearing ripe for investment. Says the group’s treasurer Renganayaki Kannan, “This type of discussion is a must-have at this juncture when there is so much negative emotion. This has brought about some sort of positivity.” Another reason to launch such initiatives, she pipes up, was: “It costs nothing.”