Mitti Ke Rang is a budding Social Venture that strives to generate livelihood for women through its E-commerce portal all over the world. MKR helps these Women Entrepreneurs to sell their products and generate employment. Co-founded by Saket Deshmukh & Amit Jain.
In a short period of 1 year, MKR has managed to deliver 5,281 Orders, to more than 250+ cities, in 5 different countries.
Added 30+ Categories and more than 2000+ Products uploaded on our Ecommerce Website by Women entrepreneurs from More than 100+ cities and 25 states from across India.
Amit Jain comes from Maharashtra’s Bhusawal – he lost his father when he was three, his grandfather then opened a tailoring shop for his mother and was supported by his cousins. After completing his B.Com, Amit started working at The Bank of New York Mellon in Pune in 2012.
In 2014, he started Mitti Ke Rang social group with Saket Deshmukh. The prime idea is to collect clothes from people who wish to donate and distribute these to NGOs and slum areas. As he had been provided support his whole life by so many people, he decided it was time to give that forward and support more people. The action got recognized and appreciated, and so Mitti Ke Rang came into existence. For a couple of years, the MKR team kept doing various social activities, alongside their full-time job.
In 2019, Amit left his bank job to give MKR his full time and attention along with Saket. They realized that there exist many women in the community in Pune itself, who are looking for opportunities to earn a livelihood.
“We started training women entrepreneurs to make cloth and paper bags and got a few orders which helped us make more products. In September as Diwali was approaching, we added tea light candles and it was a great hit. We sold 52,000 units in 40 days which generated Rs 17,500 each for five women entrepreneurs.”
After that Diwali, Amit was certain to backpack across India to meet with women entrepreneurs in rural areas and get an understanding of the women entrepreneur ecosystem and the challenges they faced in their businesses - traversing 80 cities with only Rs 17,500 in his pocket. His plan was to backpack over India covering states from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, Arunachal to Bombay.
“I started from Mumbai and went till Kanyakumari, then from there till Arunachal Pradesh. Then lockdown happened due to which I got stuck in Guwahati for 70 days.”
During that journey, he met a lot of female entrepreneurs in various cities and after speaking with them, came to the conclusion that while many women want to begin their own business, technology and social media as a medium to promote and sell their products posed a big challenge for them.
"We thought we already have a platform, so why not assist such women entrepreneurs with the platform to ease the process and help them get customers from across the globe. We started circulating forms to women entrepreneurs who wished to register their products on our e-commerce site mittikerang.org. Covid has been a hurdle and MKR only started full-fledged operations at end of December 2020.”
Mitti Ke Rang has turned the Covid-19 crisis into a great opportunity for various women entrepreneurs. Many of them began the business at home as an experiment and are now looking at making it mainstream and expanding it. Mitti Ke Rang offers a range of products, for personal consumption and gifting. Do check them out and order products to support small scale women lead businesses.
You can find MKR on Insta @mitti_ke_rang or Website www.mittikerang.org
Mitti Ke Rang