Boutique of the month - May'15!
Having known the difficulties faced by aspiring Entrepreneurs to start and pursue a new venture (just like Shopzters), it has always been in my mind to feature startups (especially founded by women entrepreneurs) and give them a platform to reach out to people. On that note, delighted to feature "Thukhil" as the boutique of the month. And oh! Thukhil is the costume designer and sponsor for VIJAY TV"s "Kalyanam Mudhal Kaadhal Varai" series. Look out for lead actors Priya & Vandhana in their collections! 
We, Suganthi and Vaanmathi like most sisters are bound by love and contradictions. Even as teenagers, in our casual talks we had discussed on owning a firm together. We still can't believe that our thoughts have taken form. THUKHIL is an E-boutique for exclusive designer clothing started by us 7 months ago and now has over 10,000 followers on Facebook and customers worldwide. Yes... it isreally happening!!!!!! 
It was not so easy to make THUKHIL happen. Our lives were going in different directions with one of us being an artist cum home maker in Bangalore and the other working in a software firm at Coimbatore. Luckily for us, we got to settle in the same city after marriage, this gave us the chance to work together. 
In India you become an Engineer first and then figure what to do with your life- we are no different from this. Though we were both Engineers by qualification, our passion has always been clothes. We decided to give our creativity a chance, so we came up with the idea of a Boutique for designer clothing. Having come from a family with textile back ground, we had adequate knowledge about the industry. We went online and chose Facebook as our channel as it was a great opportunity to connect to people and to directly deal with the customers. 
Choosing a name for our boutique was effortless. Our father founded the brand name "THUKHIL" (meaning fine clothing in Tamil) decades ago and we feel proud to revive the brand. We fixed March 8, 2014- Women's day as our launch date and started our ground work 2 months earlier. On the day of launch, we were both curious and super excited that we couldn't eat or sleep , all we could do was to refresh our Facebook page to check the response :-p Ohh yaaay, we were well received. 
We started our boutique with designer sarees and later introduced salwar materials. We also started, taking custom orders and designed sarees to customer's specification. Though we were received well at the beginning, there were some hurdles in between. Products were not moving at the same pace, but we kept pushing ourselves, we had confidence in our designs and quality of our products. 
We introduced new designs and concentrated more on marketing. People liked our designs and came back for more. Their love & trust motivated us to work even harder. Thanks to Facebook, our customer base started growing all over the world day by day. We had to increase production to satisfy customer needs and make sure that production, marketing & sales went hand in hand. 
Our father always encourages us to dream big. Though our dreams are big, we strongly believe in slow & steady growth. Our future perspective in short term is to have our own website and in long term is to make THUKHIL available in all corners of the world. Could be too big a dream but not impossible. 
We have to thank our friends and family for being our pillars of support. Especially our husbands, who had to put up with bad food (sometimes no food at all ;-)), dirty house and non-stop phone conversations between us. Jokes apart, if not for their support and encouragement, THUKHIL wouldn't have happened. 
