A BLIND STREET VENDOR FOUNDED A MILLION DOLLAR COMPANY
- April 30, 2015
- by
Bhavesh Bhatia was not born blind, but had little vision while growing up.
Born with retina muscular deterioration, he always knew that his sight would only get worse with time.
At 23, his eyes finally decided to give up on him and no amount of preparation could have predicted the gloom that was to come.
He was working as a hotel manager and scrambling to save money for his mother's treatment, who was suffering from cancer.
So, when faced with losing his mother, losing his eyesight too was a devastating blow. He was fired from his job.
His father had already extinguished all their savings on his mother's treatment.
Without a job, and no employment prospects to boot, they couldn't afford to give her the care she needed. She passed away soon after. "I took training from National Association for the Blind (Mumbai) in 1999. They taught me how to make plain candles," he recounts.
So he would make candles all night long and sell them from a cart, standing at a corner of a local market in Mahabaleshwar.
"One time some miscreants pulled all my candles from the cart and threw it in the gutter."
"Whenever I used to go around asking for help, I was told to my face, 'You are blind. What good can you do?'
While loan requests earned him outright rejections, even simple non-monetary requests were met with hostile reactions.
The turning point came when he was granted a loan of Rs 15,000 from
Satara Bank, where NAB had a special scheme for blind people.
"With this, we purchased 15 kilos of wax, two dyes and a hand cart for Rs 50,"
says Bhavesh on what would go on to become a multi-crore business.
Today Sunrise Candles uses 25 tonnes of wax a day to manufacture their
9,000 designs of plain, scented and aromatherapy candles.
They purchase their wax from the UK. Their client list includes Reliance Industries, Ranbaxy, Big Bazaar….
0 comments:
Post a Comment