How these 2 friends made 7Cr sales in 12 months by selling Bamboo Bath Towels after leaving their Corporate jobs?

Both the friends, Ayush Agarwal and Nihar Gosalia left their comfort zone of Corporate roles in Amazon & Tata Consultancy Services respectively, and explore the use of bamboo in textile concept which is not much explored in India till date. That is how these 2 friends made 7Cr sales in 12 months by selling Bamboo Bath Towels.

Ayush used to see the growth of e-commerce sellers at Amazon & other similar platforms had a gut feeling that the bamboo fabric business will definitely grow on the online D2C platforms.

Ayush and Nihar left their jobs in 2018 and started Mush Apparel in Ahmedabad to materialize their dreams and vision of selling bamboo fabric products. They sell products like towels, socks, bath sets, etc. on Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Tata Cliq, etc. In the last Financial year, they made a mind-blowing revenue of 4 Cr and in the last 12 months, they bagged Rs.7 Cr and are aiming to reach 12 Cr.

Both Ayush Agarwal and Nihar Gosalia were Engineering batchmates and close friends and often loved to discuss business ideas with each other. In spite of their corporate roles at Amazon & TCS respectively, they launched their own company.

Nihar’s family ran a textile business so he realized that bamboo fabric is a relatively unexplored concept in our country so he shared his thoughts with Ayush who immediately got convinced that this concept will surely work well in Indian online D2C channels.

Why bamboo fabric?

Mush Apparels’ bath linens are made of bamboo viscose making them absorbent, anti-bacterial, and anti-odor. The fabric is a 70% blend of bamboo and 30% cotton on the contrary to bigger fashion brands who prefer a smaller percentage of bamboo fabric. This is because generally, the fashion industry focuses on the blend. According to Ayush, some brands label themselves as their products are made from bamboo but actually, their items are only dyed with charcoal made of bamboo.

Since it needs less water, bamboo mixes are now seen as alternatives to pure cotton or polyester blends. Additionally, they need no pesticides and is highly biodegradable and moreover found in abundant quantity.

The initial business days

Both the friends started their business from Ayush’s father’s office at the beginning who is a stockbroker and he offered some space to them for their new business. The friends used to pay Rs.25,000/- per month as rent. This was a lesson by a father to these young entrepreneurs so that they can understand the value of rent amount in a business.

That is the reason he used to charge rent from them. A small amount of 5 lac rupees was invested by both the partners initially out of their personal savings and thereafter they reinvested their profits and did not inject any fresh capital into their business.

The partners decided to make towels using bamboo fabric. Nihar whose family was already in the textile business used woven fabric machines to make the textile and the same was used to make towels.

Right from day one – they had a focus to create high-quality products and made sure that there are no compromises on quality so they did the procurement of yarn from local suppliers, got that dyed, and sent it to manufacturing units who used to make towels according to their taste and blend as they wanted. In the initial days, partners Ayush and Nihar did all the transportation of raw material to local factories and picked them to deliver final products in their cars.

This is how they listed their brand on Amazon with 110 pieces of bath towels and guessed that this stock will last for 5-6 months easily. Nihar approached a store and requested them to place their product on the shelf but unfortunately, they refused because they only showcase products they bought from their distributor so they contacted the distributor’s contact information and arranged a meeting. The distributor gave them very positive feedback and he showed interest in their bamboo fabric towels and amazingly old them to sell all their stock to him but he wanted all purchases on credit. To this, they agreed and sold some of their stock. They soon learned a lesson that although selling through distributors was easy but most of their deals took place on credit.

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Business model: Online-centric

Very soon they realized that they have to focus on Amazon sales and positioned their product as a premium buy. If we talk about the premium towel market, a regular cotton towel costs in a range of Rs.500-1000 and they soon realized that their bamboo fabric towel is of much superior quality as compared to these normal cotton towels. That is how these 2 friends made 7Cr sales in 12 months by selling Bamboo Bath Towels.

Mush then decided to price their bamboo fabric bath towels and set three price ranges i.e. Rs 1,899, Rs 1,499, and Rs 1,300. To their surprise, their stock of 110 towels that they thought will last a few months was sold in just 30 days. Due to this good response, their confidence strengthened a lot in bamboo-based fabric and they started new ranges of hand towels, face towels, and much more. This resulted in their 95% sales via online channels but still, Mush is not ignoring offline sales and has tied up with various distributors all over India as well as the Middle East and the UK which is helping their offline sales a lot.

What are the current challenges?

Since products like T-shirts, etc. require polyester fabric, they did not focus on them as they only wanted to work with bamboo-based fabric. They wanted to stick to their niche but they faced a problem that their lead time is around 3-4 months. They have a very specific manufacturing process so they run out of stock and raw materials due to this.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, their raw material procurement was too much affected.

There is a huge growth expected in this sector and keeping this in mind these young entrepreneurs are hoping to create a better balance between their sales and procurement and hence improve lead time. This will also help them enter a new arena of baby apparel, bed sheets, blankets, quilts, etc. as per Aysh’s and Nihar’s viewpoint.

According to Ayush, In 2018 when they launched their brand there was no one who used to make towels like theirs but now few players are trying to enter into this field with similar products so there will be a huge competition expected in the coming time. Due to this, we need constant innovation and hence always retain the “first-mover advantage”.