Starting anything is never easy. This blog post for instance; the delete button has received more hits than any other key in its writing. I suppose that’s apt given the many almost lift-offs that the Little Big Co. had before it took full flight.
But, if we are to look at where it all began, I suppose it was circa 2015. I was in Mumbai, working as a sports journalist, my sister, Priyanka, was in Delhi working in the IT industry and our mum, Archana, was in Gurgaon, working on, well, us, I suppose. We’d all had some big changes in our individual trajectories in the previous year. I’d moved to Mumbai for work, Priyanka had gotten married and was toying with quitting her job (which she did eventually), and mum was dealing with life without her kids at home and yet helping them along via satellite in their new lives.
When I moved back to Delhi in January of 2016 for my wedding, Priyanka and I had already spent a considerable amount of time toying with the idea of starting something of our own. We weren’t at sea luckily. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what our entrepreneurship would involve; we knew it would be interior design. It was everything that went with it that seemed challenging. We hadn’t exactly been exposed to running a business in any way, shape or form growing up. We’d spent our childhood traipsing around India thanks to our father’s career in the Indian Army. We in turn went to school, college and then got jobs like perhaps everyone else in our immediate and close family.
So, after spending a few months figuring out a brand name, setting up our social media, getting acquainted with trends and the like, we waited for our break. But, it didn’t come. What did come was a job offer, for me, back in the old media industry and I snapped it up. Frankly I was bored witless not working; not seeing regular salary deposits to offset unfettered credit card spending only helped the process along. So, I took the job.
As luck would have it, a month or two in, Priyanka, and therefore the Little Big Co., got her break. It was an online consultation in Bangalore. She drew up plans, sourced and ordered furniture, Skyped in for set up and established contact with vendors. That the project encountered more than a few speed bumps along the way goes without saying. But, dogged as she is, she persevered, learned her lessons and got a few (not so great) photographs out of the deal.
Up next was work for our cousin in Singapore. She’d moved there a few months earlier and wanted help choosing fabric for upholstery, decor and other bits and bobs of advice to convert her apartment in another country in to a home for her family. Things went perfectly with this one and it gave Priyanka the two things she needed most: confidence, and, an imperative in the age of social media, lots of photographs. Suddenly, our Instagram page didn’t look like a barren desert landscape anymore. It had life.
This was also around the time that I myself ’employed’ Priyanka’s services to help with my own home. It’s not like I didn’t have the skill, it was more a paucity of time. Hours of work in the television news industry can be brutal and I was left with little energy and time at the end of a workday to set out sourcing for even the basics.
In stepped the ‘Big’ of LBC, my sister, Priyanka. And I, the ‘Little’, gladly placed the title on my five foot nothing mother’s mantle and boy did she step up. The outcome of their work in my own home was phenomenal and it meant more photos, a trickle of a following online but also a piquing of interest.
Frankly a lot happened all of a sudden back then, and since I, the chronicler was employed elsewhere, we didn’t exactly make many notes to figure out what came first and what next. There was some burning of fingers for sure. For instance an online consultation in Dubai that we were never paid for. But, in the three years, give or take a few months, that we’ve been around, we can say for certain that the good experiences vastly outnumber the bad.
And we are beyond grateful, for our first few clients in Gurgaon who took a chance on us, to our respective husbands for acting like sounding boards and rock-solid support systems all rolled in to one, to our dogs for their unrelenting love, our domestic staff for critical support on the home front and to our online family that has grown with us and supported us in the most unimaginable way.
Wish us luck on this journey too, where we hope to bring to our blog, stories from our experiences as the Little Big Co. that is now owned and run by all three of us. More on my return to the fold next time around.
Cheerio!
The Little Big Company 