The success story of a lady entrepreneur from Kochi - Beena Kannan ..
Th story of how a Kottayam, Kerala born and raised girl, Beena Kannan, the only member of the 108 year old Seemaatti family, changed her family business of trading in sarees and other dress items to be one of South India's largest saree designing and sales centres. From about 30 outlets in early eighties and nineties, run through her uncles, cousins etc, the group now has only two major stores of more than 500,000 sq ft each in Kochi and Kottayam in Kerala..Beena finished her education from BCM college Kottayam, Kerala and very soon got entrenched in the 108 year old family business. She got married early and after the demise of her husband in 2000, got together on her own and set up one of Kerala's best and best admired ready made and retail textile houses which houses a large collection of silk sarees for which it has already been known for the past many decades in South India. Having developed to many parts of South India through her extended family, she finally decided to keep her focus only in Kerala in Kochi and Kottayam and helped make the present $80 million (INR 500 crores).
Her focus was not on mindless diversification but on focused differentiation ..
The idea was a lean approach
- focusing on centralised large stores for better control
- reducing the waste of needless communication,
- reducing costs of wasteful logistics, storage, transportation etc.
- procuring raw materials and sarees of original weave right from the source
- adding repeatedly great value to the customers by
- offering better and focused medium and high value merchandise
- through limited and
- well designed outlets ..
- being more focused in the offering
- limiting the range on offer
- getting high quality input material and designs for customers straight from the weavers
- being more customer-centric ..
It is indeed a great success story of Beena to be listed in the Forbes mag issue of Mar 2019. The story of going through major hurdles in life, losing her husband early in life and almost single-handedly leading the store from rags to riches in twenty years.
This is an inspirational story of suceess in family business. Kerala being proud of the most literate state in india with many small and medium scale business run by families, let this inspire women to give visibility to their business.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the comments, Aswathi. Beena Kannan is the story of courage and determination, she deserves the applause of all of humanity .. How in spite of personal drawbacks and unfortunate events in life, she went ahead and built up this professional empire almost single handedly..
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