Asha Scaria Vettoor, Founder @ Swara

Hi everyone, welcome back to The Graduate Guide. Today we have Asha Skaria with us, who's the founder of Swara. Welcome, Asha, nice to have you here.

How's it going? Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Good, so we can start a little bit where— tell us about yourself. You moved from India to the UK, which is quite a big jump. So how did you start off in India? Where are you from? What's your history there?

Okay, thank you so much for having me. It's, uh, such a pleasure to be speaking to you. Um, a little bit about me. I'm from Kerala, which is a state in the south of India. I come from a small town called Ittumanur. So I was born and brought up there till I was 18. Then I moved to Bombay to do my undergraduation. I went to St. Xavier's College and I majored in statistics. So in my 3 years studying in Bombay, I realized that these problems that existed in Bombay. I come from a pretty small town and you don't really see beggars on the road or just the stark inequality that you see in big cities like Bombay or even London. You don't see that in a small town, right? So when I moved at such a young age to a city, I saw like people sleeping on the road or like the slums in Dharavi, which is one of the biggest slums in the world, how that slum was directly opposite one of the richest houses in the world. And this very vast inequality really bothered me and I wanted to do something about it, but I didn't really know where to start, what to do. So after my undergrad, I joined this program called Gandhi Fellowship. Gandhi Fellowship is like Peace Corps in the US or Teach for America. We also have Teach for India. Like all these programs, Gandhi Fellowship is also for 2 years and it puts fellows— you have to go through an application process to become a Gandhi Fellow. But once you are a Gandhi Fellow, they give you these schools to develop. So I was placed in a city, in a district called Dungarpur, which is in the north of India, in the state of Rajasthan, in the tribal belt of Rajasthan. So I was in this tribal area working with 4 government schools, trying to improve the education level of students there. So this is right after my undergrad, and I was really excited to go there and change the world in a way. But as you can imagine, as it is like anywhere in the world, It's especially true in tribal and rural areas in India. Government schools are heavily burdened and they have very little resources. So you can see schools where there are like 100 students and 1 teacher managing them. And this teacher is doing everything from like admin to teaching to managing the cooking that happens in the kitchen where there are helpers for that, but she has to coordinate the whole working of the school, and she's also the headmist— like the principal of the school. So you are working with schools like this, and as a Gandhi Fellow, you're encouraged to look at the school and the problems you encounter within the wider system that it sits in. So if a student is suffering in math, then you have to look at it like, does she have clothes to protect her during winter? Is she unwell? Is there domestic abuse at home? So you have to like look at it within a system also. You have to look at numbers, how many students are dropping out at which class in this particular school. So it is a— Gandhi Fellowship really opened my eyes to how like social impact has to to really change the world, you have to look at it from a very like entrepreneurial, holistic lens. So that's— Gandhi Fellowship is basically— was my introduction to entrepreneurship. And I started working with the community during my 2 years in Dungarpur. And I started Swara basically as an Instagram page in 2018. And the idea was to talk about the women in villages, how there is this vast talent that is just being untapped, that is left in rural parts of India. Because the thing is, like, India is at the end, like, patriarchal in nature. That means women are the primary caregivers, which is the same everywhere in the world. But because of this idea of who, women being at home, taking care of the family, taking care of elders. What happens is, because of a lack of jobs in rural areas, ambitious, talented, skilled men migrate to cities in search of jobs, and they leave behind their young, talented wives to take care of the houses. So these women basically run the village. They're strong, they're so capable, they're so funny. And I got to spend a lot of time with them, and I was like, they are so cool and they should be absorbed, not absorbed into the workforce. Basically, they want to earn a living and they are skilled, but there are no jobs for them to do. So how can we create jobs for them? And Swara started as a fashion brand because every house has a tailoring machine in rural areas. And the idea was that by selling clothes made by these women, we also sell their stories and their potential to a market that actually has the capital to invest in rural areas to build more jobs for women in industries other than fashion. That is a long answer.

Yeah, I know.

That's good.

Like, lots to talk about. Have you always had an interest in fashion or why was that something that came as an idea to as a potential, you know, job creation for the women that you saw in poverty?

I mean, no, I don't really have much interest. I didn't have much interest in fashion. It was a very like Fashion has the lowest barrier to entry. You can start it with almost no money. We started with £100, like ₹10,000, just to like buy some cloth, and it was all about creative marketing. So it's like, as long as you can design something new and something that connects with the customer, um, you can build a great brand, a fashion brand. So basically it's because of the low barrier to entry, coupled with the fact that almost every house in Dungarpur had a tailoring machine. So skill development programs is a huge way of how the government and corporate social responsibility wing of companies think that they're going to change the world. You know, don't give a man fish, teach them how to fish sort of thing. So like they offer a lot of skill development programs in rural areas and the most coveted program is tailoring. Most people, most young women go and enroll in a tailoring course because it's free, and at the end of it they get a loan with almost no interest fee to set up their own boutique. But that means like almost like every alternate house has a tailoring machine and is like registered as a boutique, so nobody really earns money from it. They just make clothes for their house. So why fashion? Why did we start Swara as a fashion brand, it's not because of my interest. It was basically the talent that was most easily available and the fact that it was so cheap to— like, it was so inexpensive to start a fashion brand. And we were sure we had a unique idea.

Nice. So when you started it as an Instagram page, you said in 2018, what were some initial responses like?

Oh my God, what happened? It was amazing. So like, the hypothesis was that there's a growing demand in India for ethical and sustainable fashion. In 2018, it was not like a popular topic in India. I think like there was more conversation in the UK about it. Fashion Revolution, I believe, started from the UK. They were talking about it because of this fire incident that happened in Bangladesh in 2014. So there was a lot of conversation about it in developed countries, but in India, that conversation was still nascent and The hypothesis is that that conversation is now nascent, but like it is going to like increase in popularity. These young people are gonna start wanting ethical, sustainable fashion at affordable prices. So there was still like niche brands in India who were selling clothes for like prices that weren't affordable for the people who would want ethical fashion. Basically young students or like, uh, people who had just started working, young people were woke and they will want to buy it but like at an affordable price point. So that was our hypothesis. So we had— it was based on like circles we were talking in. Also Gandhi Fellows tend to be the young woke people in like India. My cohort had like 150 students and— not students, fellows— and they were from all over the world, all over India, and they were like highly very educated, and they had this language of like systems thinking and like how do we change the world. So I— but we had this hesitation like, are we just saying this because like we are in this echo chamber and we think that this is going to be a trend in India? So we weren't very sure when we launched the brand, but like it took off really, really well. Like fashion schools, mostly from students, a lot of students picked up on the conversation we were having on Instagram. A lot of people applied for internships. So at that time, we were also Gandhi Fellows, and we were doing it as a project. Uh, we have to go to school from like 9 to— not sort of like 9 to 5 every day. So we had a full-time job, and this was like our side project. When I say we, I had a group of Gandhi Fellows. Like, we stayed together, we worked together, and they helped a lot with my project. They all had their independent projects. This was mine, but I couldn't have done it without them. So once we launched it, people wanted to work with us and I was like, this is gaining, this is way beyond like what we expected. And we were right. Like now if you look at India, everybody is— there's still that hesitation to pay more for ethical fashion or sustainable fashion. But I think that's everywhere. Like they want sustainable but at the same price point as fast fashion. But there is a lot more demand for this.

So did you pilot it in one village and then expand that, or was that— is it still kind of in one community that makes it brand-owned?

We kind of changed the business model. Initially it was like a few tailors we worked with in Dungarpur who did like the sampling. Everything was like very high touchpoint because you have to mobilize the women first, not convince them. Yeah, convince. Initially we had to convince them to try new things. They're like, who would wear this shirt? Like, um, when you think about this area, you can Google it, Dungarpur. The stuff they wear is not like the stuff we wear. They would, uh, the tailors we initially worked with, they knew how to wear, make, stitch blouses, which is like crop top sort of things that you wear under a saree and underskirts. That is something you wear under saree again. So that's the only thing they tailored. So when you ask them to make like a shirt or like a wrap pants, they're like, what is this? This is like not something people would buy. So we had to convince them to like kind of try something new. Then upskilling is very important because they are used to tailoring for, uh, people next to them or their kids. The kids are not going to ask about the quality of the stitches. So we had to like upskill them, get them to a standard that an urban that customers expect now. So we are competing with H&M. At that time, we said that we are going to compete with fast fashion because that's what everyone is buying. But now we have shifted a little bit. The business model we work with, this has gone through a few iterations. We realized this whole mobilizing women, upskilling them, and then managing their day-to-day, and then sampling new products and selling it, that is like every point of the supply chain, like front end and back end, is being catered to by one company. That is not efficient to scale up. So now we focus on collaborating with artisan groups who already do the back end, and we focus on selling it and also selling the story of the women we work with. And we still have this dream that eventually we want to get into like new sectors where we employ rural women. I'm very passionate about tourism, rural tourism. I think Gandhi Fellowship changed my life, and we need to have more programs that does like thoughtful, that facilitate thoughtful interaction between people from different backgrounds and different geographies. It really like opens your mind and makes you— makes life so much more colorful.

Yeah, I'm actually interested to hear a bit more about the Gandhi Fellowship because I imagine when you were back in studying statistics at university, it was more theoretical and you weren't really like on the ground. Yeah, the Gandhi Fellowship really turned you into an entrepreneur, I would say. So what skills do you think you learned during that fellowship, or what do you think was very different from university being such a young person? Like, what were some important lessons for you?

Yeah, um, so many, so many to talk about. So Gandhi Fellowship Uh, like I said, I was in charge of 4 schools. When I say in charge, it's more like you go into these schools and you're supposed to act like a consultant to the headmaster and basically guide him or her through like managing the schools. Like whatever problems arise, problems come up day to day in the school, you would kind of help them devise solutions. The idea that you work with a person for 2 years is that when you leave the ecosystem, like it doesn't disrupt it. Like you're— they don't act— you're not a clutch— you're not the solution, you're just facilitating for solutions with the resources that's available in the same environment. I went into Gandhi Fellowship when I was 20, and the average age of a headmaster is like 50. So like you're talking to someone who's 30 years ahead of you in their career, and you have to convince them. Also, you don't have any authority as a Gandhi Fellow, like legally it's a partnership you have with the Indian government to allow you to be in that school, but there is no requirement for the headmaster or the staff to listen to you. So there's a lot of like trust building that happens. So you have to gain their trust for them to start even listening to your suggestions or give you an opportunity to say anything. And like I said, it's all schools are resource-strapped in these areas. Um, like I said, one teacher teaching 100 students, so for you to be useful, like it took months. It's very— when I was 20 and like beginning, I wanted to change the world and that's why I signed up for Gandhi Fellowship, put myself in this difficult place. So you're like itching to do things, but you're not supposed to do things. You're supposed to stand back and just like absorb and listen. And to be most effective, I think like I needed to learn how to listen and just be like, okay, don't give solutions, don't act. Just like, and also like keep your emotions in check because it's very easy to blame that one teacher. Like, she might not— she might have a temper issue. She might like— there was, um, this is illegal, but there was still like teachers hitting kids. And like, you really— I mean, obviously you can say stop and you can complain, but more, more than that, you need to step back and ask like, why does this happen? What are mechanisms when you leave? What are mechanisms you can put in place so that it doesn't happen? And you should always look at your 4 schools as a very small percentage of the rest of the schools in India. So like, if this is happening here, it's definitely happening in like thousands of schools. So why is it still happening even though it's illegal to hit kids? And what can we do? How can we create like things to have accountability so that to, for teachers not to hit kids? And keep in mind about that there are always going to be like resource constraints and just like what is there. So I think it makes you humble and it teaches you patience. It, uh, it taught me how to like empathize with people who are like completely different from me, like the teachers, parents, students, um, and teaches you like a lot of courage to like take action. At some point you should take action because it can be very paralyzing, like the— it can be very overwhelming that nothing can ever change in this place. So it takes courage and hope to like imagine a better future and still like act. So I think like the 2 years was very, very frustrating, but now I can like step back and— because you can't change like paralyzes you sometimes. But I'm very happy that like I got to do Swara and, you know, kind of have some impact and continue that. But the lessons you learn, I think you need to look at it as a 10-year, 20-year journey as a Gandhi Fellow. So like it is all the learnings that you have had and how will you bring it back and how will you reach, like hopefully reach positions of power so that you can influence decisions without like just looking at numbers. Looking at like that person who's sitting in that school. And this exists in any system.

If you think about competitors that you maybe have or like other community projects like that that didn't work out for some reason, do you think it was those trust-building skills that you've gained from the Gandhi Fellowship to have the patience to do that? Or like what made you power through even if you had felt there was pushback from people or people didn't want to tailor like the clothes that you wanted? Or how did you navigate that as a really young woman?

Yeah, Marleen, I think the struggle exists even today. I don't think it's like I've solved it, and I think like every— like especially with the model that we are going in with now, which is where we partner with artisan groups where we are trying to sell more of their products and give them like— I think it is helping me every day, but it's always a struggle to establish those relationships. And if you ask me like other projects that failed, I think like I have tried a lot of projects in the Gandhi Fellowship. This is just one of like 10 projects that I can list now that I tried and like actually implemented, but it did not work out. And I invested way more energy and like time into building those those projects than I did. I started Swara in February 2018. My Gandhi Fellowship ended 6 months later. So before that, for like 1.5 years before that, I was launching and failing and launching and failing. And the longest I did was the tourism one, the rural tourism one, where the idea was that we'll have a chain of homestays run by rural women where it'll be like an experiential homestay, like a small version of Gandhi Fellowship where students or like young professionals, young people can come and have a 2-day program where they live the life in the village, authentic life, and the women will run it. I worked on that for almost a year and it didn't work out because Dungarpur as a place did not have much content online. So it's really hard to build trust. Like, it's a whole, like, it's something that, like, uh, the political leader of that place should take up. It's not something like a visiting Gandhi fellow who's there for 2 years can take up and do. Swara as a fashion brand was also like a marketing idea for the rural, uh, homestay because we're like, okay, to create trust for this place, we should launch a fashion brand. That'll be like a side thing. We'll let's launch the fashion brand and build that trust. And once we started the fashion brand, started looking into this marketing idea, we realized it's a whole, like, whole business and it requires like a huge team and stuff. Um, but initially it was a marketing idea for the rural homestay, and we invested a ton. I mean, I invested a lot of time and I was so passionate about it. We had an Instagram page again, but I had like a few friends come and like test out this idea. We got local villagers ready to invest money. This is like their life savings. They wanted to invest in converting their house into a rural homestay. This is like— converting means building a toilet that is usable because toilets— we are talking very tribal. There weren't proper toilets that people could use and nobody's going to come from cities to a place where there are no toilets, even though like authentic means like authentic and comfortable, which is totally understandable. So we creating that thing and seeing how much people wanted to change their circumstances was very motivating. But as a leader, as someone who mobilized them and gave them hope, I felt like I failed. And when I started Swara, actually, like, I was almost defeated. It was like the last thing probably I would have done at Gandhi Fellowship. So, like, I think Swara failed— not failed, but like, we had a lot of setbacks, and it was very easy to throw in the towel at any point. But it's just that you, you hope that things will be better, and then you with that hope.

How do you think you look at failure now? Like, you know, when you were younger, it was like obviously a setback for you, but if you think of from a student perspective, you know, students fail everywhere, like at uni, when we're applying to jobs, like things don't work out. So how do you look back at that experience and how do you see failure, failure now?

Yeah, um, That's a very interesting question because I think I'm— I— it's not like I've evolved into a perfect person dealing with failure. Yeah. Or like, um, how have I gotten better at dealing with failure? That's a good question. I think, um, I think you need to be okay with failing at, um, at things without changing, like the end goal, or just what I lacked, I think, before is the bigger picture. When the rural homestay thing didn't work out, I think I kind of felt defeated, but it was just not the right time. It was just not— I was not ready to take up that at that time. It's all like you have to look at it in a timeline. People are— I think I was short-sighted in a way. Things seem so much more urgent when you're younger. It has to be done within 6 months, within 1 year. But maybe like this is something that will happen in a few years. So I'll tell you something else. Before the rural homestays, I did this project with students called an exchange program between private school and government school students. So there was one private school in the district of Dungarpur which were like, uh, really, um, wealthy students went to. It had a computer lab, it had all these things, and an exchange program between those students and students in the government school who don't have electricity. So that was like a stark difference. It's like real proper like, um, exchange. They they wouldn't meet as equals anywhere else in probably in their life. So, um, that program was amazing, but we couldn't— and I tried a lot to scale it up. We— there was a pitch competition within Gandhi Fellowship where we got to the final stage, but we never succeeded. Uh, that was 2017, and I had to wrap it up, like, couldn't expand it. Uh, and this summer we are actually doing something similar to that with Laidlaw Foundation. For like 12 scholars from around the world. They're coming down to rural parts of India, working with our women, and really like immersing themselves for 1.5 years. So this new project that Swara is doing is like an intersection between the rural homestays and, um, the exchange program. So I feel like it has come full circle.

Nice. Yeah, sometimes things that don't work initially they do work in later on in a different form, that's for sure. So then in your personal journey, you decided to move to the UK, which is obviously very different from India and quite a different step. So tell us, how, how did you make this decision, or why did you feel like you wanted to emigrate and live somewhere else for, for a bit, or whatever?

Yeah, I'm not sure the how long, how long, how long, but, um, I'll, I'll, uh, Yeah, so, um, I, I was running Swara for like 3 and a half years when I decided to pursue an MBA in the UK or apply for it. So, um, we had— again, I learned about— so I did an MBA at Oxford, and I learned about the MBA at Oxford. MBA was not even something I thought about, um, when I was doing my undergrad, but I had somebody from a side business school doing an MBA there who had interned with Swara. So she had interned with us for 3 months and she was brilliant. And I loved like how she saw, saw the world like I did. So there was a debate when I had started Swara and I wanted to register it as an entity. And a lot of people who was part of my Gandhi Fellowship cohort was like, it should be an NGO, like a non-profit, because you're doing something for the women, should be a non-profit. And then I had like people from my undergrad or another circle of friends who are like, it should definitely be a for-profit business and you should like hire people, hire like a production company to make your clothes and just, you know, scale up, scale it up as a proper fashion brand. And I believed in the intersection of both, like a for-profit social enterprise. And this Gayatri Balan, that's her name, who interned with Zohra and consulted for us. She had the same idea about like business, like business, uh, is— should be a tool for good, and it's— they have like a social obligation, and you can register and you should register it as a for-profit business and then have, uh, social impact embedded into the business model. And I loved like everything she said, and she gave language to like things I had like vague ideas about. Um, so I when I thought about— she worked with us in the beginning of Swara, in the first 6 months. But like 3 and a half years later, Swara had reached a point where it was running well. I had a team working on it, and I realized I was stagnating as a leader. I was like lacking new ideas. I had done like small courses in between where like weekend programs, especially one run by the Chicago University they had like this center in Delhi, uh, and they had run a course. So I, um, I love learning new ideas and I felt like I was not doing that anymore, so I applied for the MBA here. Um, but like, I won't say I regret it, but it was the wrong time. Timing is everything. It's the wrong time because like when I came to the UK, like India as a India as a country underwent like a huge change. Um, direct-to-consumer brands started like popping up so much, and it just, um, we kind of lost like our edge as a direct-to-consumer, um, sustainable, ethical business. And we did like, basically we missed that like really big wave. Um, but But I think it's just you need to like pivot and like innovate again. And we are in that stage now. Like, uh, we are doing things that we are doing, uh, we are growing, but we are still like building our muscle to catch the next wave and look out for like what is the new innovation we have to be part of.

Nice. And as a last question, what do you think is up next for you personally, but also for Aswara? Where do you see it grow? And also maybe you can think about like looking back when you were a student or a Gandhi Fellow, like what, what are some of like the key takeaways you think you wish you knew back then that are now— that you now have that to able to do something like this, to run a company?

Yeah, yeah. I think, uh, what I wish I knew— I wish I had started like entrepreneurship when I was in school. Like I think entrepreneurship is the greatest best teacher. I, um, I learned by doing. I realized that after doing things in Gandhi Fellowship— I was very bored in undergrad, and like, I realized I did so many courses while I was doing Gandhi Fellowship when I encountered problems, unhappy teachers, unhappy students. So like, learn more about positive psychology. How do you create like these things, habits that create that positive psychology? And then like learn about like institutional organizational change, like how do we create that change inside a school. I think there is a big mismatch between like people who do and people who study, who research things, and there has to be an intersection. So to do my MBA, I got a scholarship from the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship. This is based within Said Business School. I'm consulting for them now, and they have this theory of bringing practitioners and researchers Because, um, with the help of research, you can do so much more efficient, uh, practice, especially in the field of social impact. Because I think businesses and for-profit businesses do a lot more, like, equipping themselves with whatever is the latest technology, but social innovation, not that much. So, um, I think, like, um, if I, if I had known how much, like, entrepreneurship can teach me, I would have —done it much already. Yeah, yeah, trying more businesses. Good.

And just to pick up on the last part, what do you think in a year from now where you're going to be with Suhara?

What is your main aim at the moment? Aim? Yeah, I think, um, I think we want to work with at least 100, uh, artisan groups, uh, affecting like hundreds of, uh, women artisans in the next one year. And, um, I hope to have like some strong international partners and bring it to the UK in a big way. We did, we did do the first fashion show. We were part of the first fashion show at the Oxford Union, which is like a huge milestone. And we do sell, we do ship internationally, but we want to create a collection for the UK summer that is coming up and expand. Good, I'll be the first one to buy it.

Nice. Thank you. Well, thank you for coming. Sounds really incredible. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Asha, and see you next time. Bye. Bye.