Hi all, thank you for the feedback on the Networking Question! Hope you can read my leadership question and give me your thoughts on my answer. Thanks!
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Leadership & Influence: Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer. (100 - 500 words)
sharp brain and a quiet determination
"One day, I'll own a company larger than FabIndia.", I assured my mother when I was just eleven years old. While I haven't established that company just yet, creating Karmaara felt very close to the real thing.
While enrolled at the Young India Fellowship ("YIF"), a one-year postgraduate diploma program in liberal arts, I decided to pursue my dream of launching an entrepreneurial project in handicrafts. It helped that I found peers who shared my passion. As a team, we brought complementary skills to the venture and had a shared vision to create beautifully handcrafted products while reviving a dying crafts industry. But to find the exact area of focus required robust market research and strong analysis. I interviewed experts in the field. The narrative that emerged was the steady decay of handicrafts in India due to declining wages and shrinking clientele. Our analysis presented a compelling opportunity in the nascent handcrafted footwear market. We founded Karmaara to ensure sustainability of the cobblers' profession through footwear design interventions and providing a platform to sell.
To convince the cobblers to join our platform, I met with them every weekend grow trust. For 2 months, I heard their stories, problems and aspirations. We utilised these learnings to customize the platform to meet their requirements while also persuading them to join us. This paid off when after 2 months, 8 of them agreed to be a part of our platform. We worked tirelessly over 5 months to design shoes, assemble raw materials and manufacture pieces. Drawing from my marketing internship with the Chennai Hip Hop Festival, I conducted photo shoots, built Instagram and Facebook pages to cultivate a strong brand presence and spark customers' interests. These garnered followings of 790 followers in a single week!
Finally, in our first sales, only 7 months from the time we began Kamaara, we sold out all seventy pairs of footwear in nine designs to break-even! We even devised a unique profit-sharing model with the cobblers whereby we shared a percentage of the sales with them, over and above the actual wages.
While I have held various leadership positions in the past, this single experience of building and growing Karmaarahas been instrumental for me to understand my leadership qualities and strengths. Focusing on my inquisitiveness, empathy, open-mindedness and decisiveness have helped me transform daunting leadership situations into opportunities to bring impact. I've led operations of an accelerator program in Vietnam, spearheaded special technical assistance programs for early-stage stage social start-ups, and formulated the growth strategy for a 17-year- old incubator among others.
My personal brand of leadership can be summarized thus: While I may not shout the loudest, my introversion is characterised by a sharp brain and a quiet determination to succeed. I've learnt that it is possible to support the causes I strongly believe in - social entrepreneurship, innovation and handicrafts - through silent yet persistent confidence. I intend to use my position as a Chevening Scholar to build impactful and innovative businesses.
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