Shout Outs

I never imagined the ways in which running a business would affect the way I think about people interactions and social skills. I’m usually pretty good at exhaling at the end of a day and not taking things people do or say personally, but one thing I am still working on is gratitude: giving it and not expecting it.

There have been a few incidents, since the time I started, when I have bent backwards to make an order or an alteration happen in less than 24 hours, or door delivered garments (for free) without any thanks or acknowledgment from the customer. I know this attitude is not at all conducive to good customer service, but hey, I’m allowed to be human once in a while (and that’s what this blog is for anyway). These gymnastics also affect the way I treat incompetent customer service representatives at other businesses (“if I can bend backwards to make it happen, why can’t you?”), not realizing that their sales staff don’t own their business so the situation is not comparable.

As for my customers, I know they aren’t obliged to give me business, and if good service is what it takes to keep them coming back to my store, then so be it. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard coming to terms with the fact that it takes years to build a good reputation that can be destroyed very quickly if a few people have a bad experience.

In the spirit of thanks and of acknowledging important influences, I want to give a big shout out to Fabindia right here in this blog post. Fabindia is now an amazing empire with over 100 stores in India, and although a lot of people complain about the lack of great service, the lack of standard sizing and the sometimes poor quality, no one gives them credit for what they are really doing. Aside from providing relatively inexpensive traditional crafts, beauty and bath products and organic food products (their chapati atta is pretty good by the way), to me their real service has been cultivating good taste. If you think about how people’s aesthetic taste evolves, their surroundings and their exposure at a young age play a huge role. By making handwoven and printed textiles accessible to a wide range of income groups, Fabindia has reached out to generations of Indians and tourists and made them excited about Indian crafts. In the process, it has also built the foundation for brands like mine that rely on the assumption that Indian women like traditional fabrics. And thanks to Fabindia, many craftsmen still practice their art because they’ve had constant demand for their work from this amazing empire!