Saurabh Says: How I ended up starting a company with Alicia Souza

( I figured that my mini team has a lot of great stories so I asked them to pen down things they'd like to add to the blog. Saurabh, my business partner, is first on the job! His story is below...)

My name is Saurabh Sharma and this is my story.

It was a regular day at the ex-office. I was aimlessly facebooking and happened to stumble upon Alicia Souza’s interview on yourstory. (Looking back – facebooking that day turned out to be life changing!)

Something about her, made me think. Instinctively, I felt like reaching out to her. I also thought – why would she even respond? I still wanted to try my luck and wrote to her on facebook. I mentioned that I work with a candle manufacturing company and wanted to discuss if she’d be interested to work on a range of doodled packaging.

She responded and gave me her email ID, asking me to share a detailed brief. I was truly elated!

I sent an email out to her and we’ve kept in touch ever since. Funnily enough, a line from my first email to her said: “Hopefully, we’ll be able to make this connection meaningful.“

She got back saying she was excited about the possible outcomes of the project and suggested that it would be good to have a meeting. We met few months later in Bangalore.

One day, very randomly I sent her a list of ideas, of how she can make the most out of her talents.

Some ideas for Alicia – I wrote this email back in 2014:

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1. Start expanding into various product categories. Example: pillows, phone cases, t shirts, accessories.
2. Get someone to handle the business side of things so you can focus on creating content. ( I had no idea this person was going to be me! )
3. Get your products selling at major retailers.
4. Develop a beautiful website for all your merchandise, find a company to whom you can outsource day to day operations and build a model where they report to you on the key performance indicators of the website/business.
5. Find a link between doodled interiors and workplace happiness. Wall art, office space interior designing are some areas your illustrations can do wonders.

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Looking back, the email sounds almost creepy! Most of what I wrote to her, has actually transpired into reality. In fact, just last week we launched our wall art collection and we are coming out with a range of decals for offices soon!

Just so you know – there were couple of other points in the list that I’d sent to her – one was about distributing products globally and the other about someday having her own retail store! Watch out! 😃

Coming back to the story, sometime in mid 2015, I had invited her to Tuticorin to see the factory. A small town in Tamil Nadu, where I used to work. She somehow made it!

The factory visit went well. We were out for lunch and I told her about my plans of quitting. I wasn’t enjoying the work and was feeling a bit too safe. Risking a safe secure job to pursue something I loved doing, seemed like the right thing to do.

She told me about how her career panned out after quitting a job. And how her life has been nothing less than rewarding. I was awe- inspired by this super human! She just said – “if you happen to be in Bangalore, do meet me and we will figure out something together.”



That’s me having the ultimate fanboy moment!

Far away from the safe sea shores of Tuticorin, I met her again sometime in July 2015. By then, we knew there was some scope of us working together. We agreed to risk our time and re-start her online store. No paperwork, no agreement and no plans for the future. Things just felt right. She thought we could close the online store post valentines day and just run it for few months a year. The response was overwhelming. And I knew this could be turned into something more bigger and more meaningful.

So after a year of running the store on an experimental mode, a ton of emails and multiple discussions, – we started Alicia Souza Studio Pvt. Ltd.

From just two of us, a year back, we are currently a team of 6 humans and two fur balls working towards spreading smiles and happiness all around.

If there’s one thing you would like to take back from this post, It is this – Life is all about the people we meet.