totebags.in

I started totebags.in right after finishing 12th grade, just before joining business school, because I figured the best way to learn business was to actually run one.

The problem was that I had limited-to-no artistic skills and had decided to sell hand-painted bags.

So I taught myself.

For the first year, I was a one-person company in the most literal sense.

I sourced the bags, painted them, packaged orders, handled logistics and finances, ran social media, managed customer relationships and figured out what the hell I was doing as I went.

And it started working.

Our marketing was almost entirely social-first, with discovery initially driven through word of mouth and eventually supported by targeted advertising around exhibitions and local activations.

Then came our first exhibition.

I hand-painted around 35 bags myself.

They sold out in under 30 minutes.

That was my first real signal that this wasn’t just a fun side project. People genuinely wanted customisation and something that felt handmade, and that became the niche we built around.

By the second year, I realised the next problem:

I couldn’t scale a one-person operation.

So I brought on a co-founder and an artist.

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By year three, we had grown into a team of six artists, two founders, a marketing lead and an exhibitions team member.

The business eventually completed 1,000+ orders across exhibitions and online sales, while continuing to build its customer base almost entirely through social media.

Then came the slightly annoying problem with making things by hand.

Hand-painted products are great for differentiation.

They are considerably less great when someone wants a lot of them at once.

High-demand periods and bulk orders meant more people, more coordination and more production time. Scalability became the problem I had to learn to manage.

It was something we were actively working through when my MBA started, and balancing a growing business with an academically rigorous programme eventually meant I had to shut the business down.

tote bags taught me things no classroom could.

Management, because eventually one person can’t do everything.

Leadership, because other people are trusting you to make decisions.

Ownership, because when you’re the founder, there isn’t really anyone else to blame.

Execution, because an idea doesn’t mean much if the order doesn’t reach the customer.

And probably most importantly:

I learnt to take a problem from “someone should do this” to “I’ll do it.”

From painting my first bag badly to building a team around something that started in my head, I got to experience almost every side of building a business.

Which, as business-school experiments go, turned out to be a pretty useful one.