My name is Himanshu Lunagariya and I am from Gondal, Gujarat- a very small town having a population of one lakh. I am a proud software engineer and entrepreneur. I have just started my own brand, Covervilla. Let me talk about my journey – maybe somewhere, someone will be inspired by my journey.
There are two members in my family, me and my mother (Geetaben Lunagariya). My sister got married in 2014. In 2007, my father, the late Sureshbhai Lunagariya, expired due to an illness. All the responsibilities, worries and tension came on my shoulders. As my father was suffering from illness for two years, all our savings and properties had already been sold out to fund his treatment. At the end of year 2007, when I came to know that we had nothing to feed ourselves, I was in the ninth standard. My mother is the one who took all the responsibilities on herself – she took up a job in schools, some tuition classes and a tailoring job to feed my sister and me.
In 2011, I enrolled myself in an engineering college for a course on computer engineering. Luckily in 2013, I landed a job in the private sector at Bajaj Finserv India, in the post of a sales executive. In 2014, my sister got married – and from then on, our family has had only two members. I started to took for freelancing work on online portals in 2015, and I was able to earn ₹7000-8000 per month from freelancing. I could only complete my Bachelors degree in 2016, as I had previously been detained, due to low attendance. All my expenses and basic needs were fulfilled by my job and freelancing but what was annoying me was the fact that despite being a student of computer engineering, I was doing a marketing job.That is the main reason why I quit my job at Bajaj Finserv at the start of 2016. I set up all the things at my home for freelancing work – and I was lucky that I was able to earn ₹7000-8000 a month from the freelancing work. In the middle of 2016, I felt that this freelancing work was not suitable for my life prospects. At that time, EngineerBabu , an IT Company in Indore was trending on social media – on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and everywhere else.
I read the story of Mayank Pratap Singh and Aditi Chaurasia’s startup of EngineerBabu and MotorBabu. I was very much inspired by their story, and wanted to start up my own brand and product. At that time, I had savings of around 20,000 rupees from my previous work. As I am a computer engineer, I was able to develop my own e-commerce product at Covervilla.
I spent around ₹2000 for purposes of hosting and obtaining the certificate and domain names, ₹5000 were spent to register – and I still had ₹13000 to expend on my dream. I started to search the product that I wanted from local vendors, wholesalers and manufacturers. Luckily, at that time, one of my friends came to me because he wanted to develop his own website for their factory. I met him and then I came to know that he was starting a manufacturing factory for the very same product which I madly needed for my startup. At the second meeting, I dealt with him and obtained product images, free of any costs. Whenever someone purchases through our portal, that product will be manufactured within one or two days – so there is no need of sustained investments for the product.
After that, I met many printing media companies to print our bags, and courier companies to tie up with us. I finally made a deal with two courier companies and got one printing partner who prints all our bags. I spent ₹3000 for the printing of sample bags – and in this manner, Covervilla entered the market.
Currently, we receive many orders on our website. We differ from other e-commerce portals because we have no vendors, as we have our own manufacturing unit. Also we have no investors, having started with a very low budget. We are currently trying to branch into other products such as car covers, as well. We offer all our products at competitive – and even lower – prices, compared to other e-commerce sites.
This is the story of my journey of how I started selling my own products, with a very low budget. I hope that somewhere, someone will read this and be inspired by my story – just as I was inspired by EngineerBabu.
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