Keeping a new entrepreneurial venture buoyed during the pandemic is no mean feat. And still existing in the market when the challenging times have somewhat subsided speaks volumes about the venture. It talks about its steadfastness that stems from the promise of quality of its products, innovation, and marketing strategies. One such example is the gelato start-up Minus 30 that caught itself in the webs of Covid just when it had started expanding its base to other Indian cities.
Gayatri Rattha has done her B. Sc. in Managerial Economics & Strategy from London School of Economics & Political Sciences, London. Shivanie Mirchandani has pursued her B. Sc. in Psychology & Neuroscience from Nottingham University, England
We started in 2016. The idea was born because we grew up eating my mother’s ice creams. She’s a trained chef and we used to see her send it to a lot of people. So we thought that it would be a great idea to monetise it. My sister and I decided to start this together. Shivanie went on to go to Italy to learn how to make gelato and train there. She eventually started working at a gelato shop. She came back, and we worked on flavours and decided to launch it in Delhi in a very small way.
We sort of moonlighted into this because we both had full-time jobs at the time. We started out from our home kitchen, we had a small machine and it was just the both of us and one delivery guy that we had hired. Although the business venture started off in a really small way, what we began to see very early on was that we had a very high customer retention rate. Now we can quantify that with a number and it stands at 80%.
Our first milestone was moving out of our home kitchen into a small production facility in Okhla! It was a tremendous effort moving into this facility and out of our home kitchen. It finally felt real!