A city with a multitude of people, Hyderabad with its ever growing expat community along with the Hyderabadi crowd that’s always been there, the city has developed its own quintessential style. Trying to experiment and break into that style is Hema Subramanyam. Raised and educated here, Subrmanyam believes that her brand of terracotta jewellery, Colour D Earth, is just the thing the city needs.
“The city predominantly has an ethnic sense of fashion. Terracotta fits perfectly with that and there aren’t too many options available. So I believe I’m here at the right time.” The jewellery line that initially started out as Alankriti in 2003 in Bengaluru, where Hema shifted to after getting married, travelled to Mumbai before coming back home and starting new. The 39-year old single mom tells us more.
At first
I was actually a management consultant when I got married. I worked in the IT sector for a while before I quit, as it didn’t really work out with the family. One day I attended a clay workshop with my children and just fell in love with it. That’s when I started experimenting and my first initiative Alankriti was started. This was in June 2003. I began doing consignments for boutiques and stores, displaying the merchandise for a period of a month at a time. This though wasn’t the best business model to follow, and breaking even was a problem.
In between
In 2005, I followed my husband to Mumbai and set up Alankriti there too. I juggled both my Bengaluru and Mumbai operations for almost a year. It was challenging, but more importantly, I wasn’t getting where I wanted to be. With the consignments, my jewellery would sit on the shelf in a store for a month and then come back to me. Since I was buying the stock directly from the artisans, turning a profit was becoming difficult.
Gold luck
In 2009, I was part of the Goldman Sach’s 10,000 Women Entrepreneur Certificat Programme and that was a real game changer. I realised that instead of doing consignments, I had to retail my jewellery. Those three months were the most gruelling yet life-changing. I met so many other woman, many of them doing something similar to me, and it really opened my eyes.
In 2010, I came back to Hyderabad to start fresh. I stopped what I was doing till then and created Colour D Earth. I travelled across the country looking for artisans and in the space of two years, mushroomed from just two artisan groups to 12.
Turn around
Today, I have artisans from Karnataka, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Jharkand and Tamil Nadu making jewellery for me. They send me their work, I pay them up-front and then I retail them at my kiosk in GVK One mall. Things have been better after that and its given me the space to experiment as well. Besides terracotta, I have been working with brass ornaments and recently began doing certain ceramic jewellery too, called Kuprkabi (Marathi for cup and saucer).
Learning curve
Since the start in 2003, I have definitely learnt a lot. The most important lesson though I think would be that I learnt to distance myself emotionally from the product while marketing it. I used to be very passionate about how the product would look and spend a lot of energy on trying to get it to be perfect and expect the same return. But there’s is a fine line between production and marketing and I know that now. Also, this March, I was privileged to have been chosen for the International Visitor Leadership Program, a professional exchange funded by the U.S. Department of State Office of International Visitors in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over there I met so many other women entrepreneurs and realised that all of us face the same challenges world over. While we think they (American women) are more liberated, they face the same gender-equality issues. In fact, it’s surprising to know that there are actually more number of women entrepreneurs here in India. That was another real eye-opener.
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