The EPIC Alternative represents an underserved marketplace brimming with attainable for scale. Meet 5 marketers from small cities and villages in India who used ingenuity and resolution to construct their companies, representing tens of millions of others. This is how you’ll be able to be a part of their enlargement tale.
This newsletter has been revealed in partnership with Enmasse Global.
‘Blind however with a imaginative and prescient for the longer term.’
That is how Thrissur’s Geetha Saleesh perspectives herself. On the age of 15 — when she used to be recognized with a unprecedented genetic dysfunction that compromised her imaginative and prescient in the end resulting in blindness — if Geetha used to be advised that she’d don the hat of a businesswoman sooner or later, she would have discounted it as a delusion.
However these days, her goals are endless.
No stranger to demanding situations, Geetha found out early on that there are two antidotes to adversity — decision and perseverance. These days, she is on the helm of ‘House to House’, a startup that prides itself on natural turmeric-based merchandise. Her challenge is witnessing spectacular good fortune.
Astounding, isn’t it? The ripple impact of a easy thought!
As Geetha strides into her production unit each and every morning, her enthusiasm is obvious. In the end, she resides her dream. However her tale isn’t in isolation; it echoes the untapped attainable that lies inside many “Entrepreneurial Families” reminiscent of hers throughout India, even in small cities, towns and villages.
The EPIC Tales Video contest organised by means of Enmasse Global in collaboration with The Higher India used to be an try at underscoring the trips of tens of millions like Geetha who’re the drivers of the rustic’s subsequent financial wave. The competition referred to as for entries from around the nation of people who find themselves turning their goals and aspirations into fact by means of doing a variety of items, from beginning companies to innovating in on a regular basis lifestyles, thus bringing monetary enlargement to their families. Storytellers from all corners of India joined in and the competition supplied them with the degree to carry the struggles and victories of Entrepreneurial Families (a time period coined by means of Enmasse) to gentle.
What are Entrepreneurial Families? You’ll recognise them as savvy, business-minded, resilient families with more than one source of revenue streams and strategic borrowings, all leveraged for enlargement, and also you’ll in finding them throughout you, and around the nation.
The objective of the competition, thus, used to be to ship out a transparent message that those properties are now not a sidenote within the margins. They dangle the transformative energy to form the way forward for the rustic’s economic system.
A competition like this gives the chance for current and new marketers and enterprise leaders to transport the gaze clear of giant towns and disposable earning to small cities and core services and products, and so they’ll in finding that the marketplace attainable is immense. Enmasse Global calls this the Financial Energy of Industrious Communities, or the EPIC Alternative.
A brand new age creed
In a 2022 tale, Forbes India referred to as homeowners of small domestic companies the ‘OG marketers’. The moniker is subsidized by means of statistics. In line with a 2024 record by means of Praxis International Alliance for Enmasse Global, in FY 2023, India’s 247 million entrepreneurial families drove an $8.8 trillion transaction price — with a good portion being casual transactions, unleashing a brand new financial panorama.
The upward thrust in home-owned companies and their good fortune are a nod to the perception that the rustic’s financial potentialities don’t essentially lie within the palms of industrial enterprises. However reasonably, that magic can steadily be brewed within the smallest of farms and residential kitchens. That’s the place India’s collective enlargement tale is unfolding, each and every unmarried day.
Desires, in spite of everything, do not have house; they simply call for resilience.
Whilst we rejoice those heroes, the adventure doesn’t finish right here. It’s only the start. The typical false impression nonetheless says that folks from such smaller cities and towns are an financial chance and that this section isn’t in a position for business engagement, for causes such because the unwillingness or incapability to pay for high quality items and services and products. There’s a presumption that those communities aren’t economically colourful and that folks need to transfer to special towns within the pursuit of financial enlargement.
The street of financial vibrancy has lengthy been crowded with business and mainstream intake. That is why, below the banner of the EPIC Alternative, Enmasse Global is advocating a shift in belief and calling traders, marketers, shoppers, you and me, to present the Entrepreneurial Families a possibility.
Geetha’s tale is reflective of this. Additionally it is some of the winners of the EPIC Tales Video contest. Right here’s a have a look at the opposite 4 winners.
The champions of alternate
Whilst Geetha discovered her calling within the kitchen, Maharashtra’s Yogesh Gawande discovered it within the fields. Gazing his brother fight pesticide poisoning used to be each heartbreaking and provoking for Yogesh, a resident of Waluj village. He went on to begin Niyo Farm-Tech, which crafts easy, leading edge, and reasonably priced agri-equipment that guarantees farmers aren’t in direct touch with insecticides. One among their hit merchandise is the wheel-based sprayer. As of late, farmers in 22 states throughout India are being impacted thru Yogesh’s innovation.
Sharing a identical imaginative and prescient to empower farmers is a tender businessman Mohit Runge from Pandhurna, Madhya Pradesh. His ‘Keshava Dairy Plant’ has a twin vantage — it contributes to farmers’ source of revenue as milk is gathered from them to make milk-based merchandise, whilst native early life hired on the dairy earn an source of revenue.
Sushant Uniyal is thought of as one thing of a hero in Dadur village in Uttarakhand. Sushant had simply finished his media research in 2017 when he says his brother had a brainwave to go back to the village and experiment with mushroom farming. “We began with 2 kg and these days we produce 100 kg day-to-day,” he smiles. Impressed by means of Sushant, many extra villagers determined to show their consideration to mushroom farming, with some becoming a member of Sushant’s farm and others taking steering from him.
In a similar fashion, in Hyderabad, Keerthana’s wholesome snacking emblem 9Nutz is seeing an ideal reaction. The emblem provides a variety of millet-based chocolates and chikkis (conventional Indian chocolates made with nuts and jaggery). The inception of the logo lay in Keerthana being appalled by means of other people’s dependence on speedy meals. She determined to present them one thing more healthy to satiate their cravings and loss of revel in didn’t deter her from diving headlong into entrepreneurial waters. And the way!
The 5 heroes you believe you studied above are the torchbearers in what’s a protracted procession of other people throughout India, together with from small cities and rural geographies who’ve goals they need to scale. Such an untapped mine of ambition and financial prosperity gifts a once-in-a-generation inflection level to toughen their aspirations.
All this is wanted is a bridge to carry them to the shore of financial potentialities.
And we will construct it in combination.
Edited by means of Pranita Bhat