Khudmukhtaar | Behind the Scenes
Realizing that right now we are in the eleventh week of our fellowship reminds me of when Dr. Seuss said, “How did it get so late so soon?” How indeed did we get into this week so soon when March sounds like a blink ago? But that is what happens to the time spent well, right?
I remember writing the first blog on the Mega Project progress thinking we are midway through the fellowship only, but here we are at the end, sooner than expected. A lot has happened in the past two weeks, we have gotten nearer to turning our Mega Project into a reality, we have learned much more than we had back then and we have successfully gotten past the horror that the mock interviews brought in. But among all the chaos the thing that has remained constant is our Mega Project brand Khudmukhtaar.
Through our megaproject, we are aiming to create a strong impact on our society. Due to the pandemic, many people have lost their regular jobs. Small enterprises, especially women working from home, have been negatively impacted by this pandemic. Many of the businesses have shifted online, but these people do not have the access to sophisticated marketing tools to reach out to new customers. To serve them, Khudmukhtaar was created. The idea was proved to be a success because it was warmly welcomed by those who were naïve to the online market. We believe the social status of most of the most would be uplifted with the help of this idea.
As mentioned in Blog 1, we set up our Instagram, raised funds for purchasing the inventory by creating fellowship T-shirts for our fellow fellows, researched the market, and bought the inventory by the time it was time for our first Blog. We had also gotten our samples ready and received our first orders. Coming to what happened afterward, we started advertising our product among our friends and family circles. We successfully received 3 more orders, making it a total of 5 till now.
However, the time came with its own challenges, the first problem that we faced was the tailor’s refusal to make further orders due to her family issues. Our members again started searching for tailors in our domains. Luckily, Muhammad Waleed was able to find another woman who agreed to work with our team. As we mentioned earlier, we got our first order from outside our circle and as it was within reach of Yumna Noor, she delivered our first order herself.
However, we figured out that it was not going to be feasible for future orders so we decided to register our brand with a courier service. Muhammad Waleed started researching to find a courier service that would be compatible with our conditions. After researching we finalized “Bluex” as our delivery partner. People also demanded to start COD service as well because of the scams happening on daily basis. Therefore, on public demand, we also introduced COD service through Bluex.
Another challenge we faced during this time was the whole process of dispatching the fellowship T-shirts that we had created for fundraising. Due to the Eid holidays, the deliveries got a bit late and we noted that the people who had placed the orders were procrastinating on the payments. Mahnoor Mushtaq, Muhammad Waleed, and Hamza Sohail started contacting the individuals who had filled the Google forms regarding the shirts. They interacted with them, got payments for the shirts, and then dispatched them. The shirts and designs were well-liked. We continue getting orders daily, and our fundraising for the project is also going smoothly. We are also getting a positive response from the public.
As Eid-ul-Adha is also near, we are planning to introduce new materials and designs to our shop. Muhammad Jalal, Afeen Aiman, and Amir have also started searching for female tailors in their circles because we will be needing more tailors in the future. We are also planning to make our system more professional. For that, we will introduce our website to provide easy access to our customers.
We have always heard of beautiful quotes regarding the hard-work; how we can achieve our goals through hard work. But let me share another secret with you; one strong word and that is self-belief. No matter how much effort you put into your work, if you doubt yourself every day, you are going nowhere. Believing in yourself when others do not is what you need to do every single day. No doubt what we have achieved as a circle is because we believed in ourselves and trusted other members. The road to success is not a straight path but you have to face many hurdles, but the journey can be beautiful and memorable by supporting each other. We can proudly say that we have achieved our target in the estimated time. We have got 5 orders which seemed quite difficult at the start. We felt a little disappointed in the first week, but then we worked even harder and never looked back. We provided opportunities to three women and we cannot put their feelings of joy into words when we told them about our plans.
Helping someone is the best feeling one can experience in his/her life and we are lucky enough to have this experience.
How can we forget about the growth of every member of the circle? We have seen members growing mentally. We can say that we have learned how to work in a team, how to tackle uncertainty, and not to lose hope when everything seems impossible. This project has made us think beyond our capacities and has made us discover another side of ourselves that was even hidden from us.
With this success, we are going to continue this business of ours in the future. We have got some really good customers who are expecting much more than what we are doing right now.
So, how can we disappoint them? We plan on adding more items other than clothes like bedsheets, shawls, etc., and even variations in the designs. Currently, we are targeting only Instagram and we have a huge potential audience on Instagram, but we are planning to expand to other social media platforms in the future. We have some exciting plans for the coming Eid as well. So, stay tuned with KhudMuktaar.
