Here’s how one woman and her partner are making the city of Chennai sweeter every single day.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions, in some cases businesses too. Ask Shri N., the founder of Chennai’s The Cookie Company and she’ll tell you all about it.
Fuelled by the need to earn a little money while studying, Shri was all about hustling. What started as a small passion, soon turned into a full fledged business.
Here’s how this first-generation entrepreneur is taking her business to the next level and reaching more customers through Minis on Swiggy.
Not so mini cookies
Growing up, Shri was always a hustler. “I didn’t get pocket money like others of my age, so I did small projects on the side. I learnt how to do graphic designing, I modelled and and had other side hustles to keep the income coming. I just needed enough to go and have fun on the weekend with my friends. In addition to this, I would also bake small goodies for my friends’ birthdays to save money,” says Shri, who studied to become an architect.
So how did she go from hustling to starting a baking business? “In the final year of my college, I was doing my thesis from home. It was during this time that I started working out a lot and gradually an interest in eating healthy came about. That’s when I was looking for healthy desserts,” she says. As time went by, she kept baking and started substituting ingredients with healthy alternate versions.
So how did she take this interest and turn it into a business? “I baked a cheesecake for my partner’s birthday. Everything was made from scratch and at home,” Shri says. That cake turned out to be amazing and that gave her the push to start her business with Tariq Mustafa, her partner, two-and-a-half years ago.
“In the beginning it was just Tariq and me baking and handling the entire business. But now we have a team of six members, five of whom are women,” says Shri, who hires people who are novices in baking and trains them.
Mini steps to big changes
So how did they onboard with Minis on Swiggy? “Our initial plan was to develop an app for the company. But as luck would have it, I happened to see another entrepreneur post about Minis and how good it is for her business. That piqued my interest and I decided to check it out,” says Shri who currently has 12 to 15 flavours on the menu.
From the ease of onboarding and the simple ways of working to the hassle-free process of handling business on the platform, Shri loves it all.
“One of the things that stands out for me is how easy it is to manage our orders in terms of logistics. We were considering hiring someone for the same, but Minis is helpful in more ways than one can imagine. We’re able to manage our accounting seamlessly, can give our customers discounts and keep them coming back, we’re in control of it. On Minis you’re also able to keep an account of how much money is coming in and going out, that gives us control over our business,” she explains.
“Being on Minis showed us that we don’t have to be on bigger aggregators to be able to gauge what our products are capable of. The interface of Minis is very simple for a business owner who has to take care of many other things. We now actually push all our customers who message us on Instagram to Minis because it’s just so easy to handle the entire process,” Shri says.
While being able to handle everything on their own is great for Shri and Tariq, she adds, “Any time we’ve faced any issue Prajval from Minis has always stepped in to help us and even understand the potential of our brand.”
So what does the future hold for The Cookie Company? “We’re growing on Minis and will continue to do so. The fact that we sudden;y went viral and people started loving our products pushed us to start our first physical store in Chennai.”
As the company continues to make big leaps, one thing is obvious: Shri and Tariq are two tough cookies that don’t crumble easy.
