MyEarth Eco Bags are, as the name suggests, bags which act as alternatives to all the nasty plastic that we have been using which degrades the environment horribly. These bags are made of local resources and are made by local manpower, especially women with the view of giving back to the environment and also to help women break through the 4 walls of the house. Founded in 2015, it has been moving forward with the goal of giving marginalized women a chance to build their life with the creation of a eco-friendly product which is made from locally available resources.
The company has shown to uplift the environment and women has helped them win Best Start up at The Start up Mela 2018 and has come into the top 15 of the Slush Global Impact Accelerator Pitching Competition 2017.
Story behind the Initiation
When Stuti Thapa was working a 10-5 job, she realized that her true calling was something else. She figured out this isn’t what she wanted to do, and had to take a step and have a business she could call her own. She wanted to establish something which would be prepared from locally available resources while simultaneously helping the women around her. That’s how MyEarth eco-friendly bags was born. But it wasn’t such a straight path. She experimented and played around with ideas like floriculture and candle making that fulfilled her goals before deciding on MyEarth bags. ‘I always knew I wanted to help women and empower them. So first I thought of ideas like floriculture or candle making, but in the end the idea that became a reality was the MyEarth eco-friendly bags’, she says.
In this day and age, Thapa agrees that it isn’t necessary to have a new idea but what is important is that you need to bring the necessary changes required to make the old idea unique and yours. Her idea isn’t new but she worked hard and gave it her all and now she has happy customers spread out all over the world. Thapa says that young entrepreneurs lack patience and care about materialistic things more than their actual vision of their startup.
Inspiration
The CEO says that she’s been passionate about giving women a place to bloom and grow. With a smile on her face, she says that on reflecting, she’s sure she made the right decision opening up MyEarth eco-friendly bags because she’s always given importance to bringing women ahead, and her business has helped women grow and given them so many opportunities. ‘My main goal has always been to bring women out of their shell and i’ve always given priority to women empowerment.’, Thapa says. And her business is also centered around using locally available resources and has been acting as a hub for women of all kinds to come together and start their life as an independent woman.
Challenges
MyEarth eco-friendly bags have been making environment friendly and reusable bags since 2015. With no investors, stakeholders or co-owners, she began MyEarth eco-friendly bags with a personal investment of 2.5 lakh rupees. She says it was the peak of the blockade when and she had kick started her career with a whooping order of 10,000 bags. While other businesses gave up, she rose to the challenge with courage and spread her wings and flew. ‘I was really confused as to what i should do. Should i give up now or struggle on and not quit?’ she says. She and her team of women struggled through insufficient manpower and minimal fuel with the help of extended deadlines to complete her first order and hasn’t looked back since.
Response from customers
Thapa says that the feedback has been very positive and encouraging since the very beginning. She and her team have always taken her customer’s thoughts into consideration while making new products. That is why she now gets orders for her bags from all over the world like Spain, Australia, etc.
Future Plans
Currently, Thapa and her team are taking steps and strategizing to make sure everyone discards plastic completely and carries at least one reusable bag with them. ‘The government might have laws to ban plastic but laws don’t work unless we work together and follow them’, Thapa says. She hopes she can expand her range of products with products like laptop bags, caps with better quality and is working to find more resources that can be used because MyEarth wants to give back to the environment as much as they can.
Message
She compares the vision of a startup to the core foundation of a house: ‘”No matter what, if the base is strong, the house will stay intact. In the same way, youth need to build up their startup with a strong idea so they can develop it into an empire.” In the end, she wants to tell the aspiring youth of today that you should immerse yourself into your business passionately for it to survive.
Presented by: Prathana Thapa
Startups to support #skills2grow4life
