Before 2001 I had a restaurant selling Tea, Biscuits and other confectionery products to customers. However, I was not satisfied with the business. That is when I decided that I want to do a medium size business that would give me better profit. So I went to Old town, Dhaka, to learn about footwear products production. I got training on how to produce footwear products. After that I started my Business Oishi Sandal Factory. At Oishi Sandal Factory, we produce shoes, supply them to local showrooms and also export shoes in overseas markets. 

My business was going well. I was able to make around 2-3 crore tk of annual income yearly. We were a team of more than 40 workers and managers. We also started exporting our footwear products in Saudi Arabia. After expanding our business into the export market, we realized that we need to increase our production capacity as well in order to meet the order demand. Thus, since 2008 I have taken a total of around 70 lac tk loan. I used the money to increase our production capacity and meet the order demand. The business was running well, I was even interviewed by LCP about my business, everything was running well according to my plan.

However, when COVID-19 came, it came with a plethora of problems and bad news for my business. We started seeing a decrease in sales for footwear products. Our buyers also started to face loss. We were having an excess production of products as we had higher capacity than the sales rate during COVID-19. Thus, the majority of our inventory was unsold during COVID-19 and we faced a massive loss during this period. This was even multiplied when a new prince was elected in Saudi Arabia who changed a lot of the import policy of the country. Thus our export rate decreased by around 50% compared to our previous export rate. Our buyers were also facing similar losses in their business. We have over 1 crore tk receivables from our buyers. As of now we are still running the business on loss.

Slowly we are going out of business this way. In order to reduce the loss, we had to cut our employee number from 40 to around 18-20. We reduced our production as well in order to reduce loss due to excess inventory storage. We are trying our best to collect the receivables from our buyers and expand our business in the overseas market as well. However, we are still struggling to overcome the loss faced and still facing due to COVID-19. 

I learnt about LightCastle Partners from a project that I took part in, called B-SkillFUL. I once got a phone call from LCP questioning around in regards to the footwear industry, while simultaneously informing on the current state of the market demand as well as product quality. I definitely look forward to working with LightCastle Partners in the future, and I can tell for sure that it’s an opportunity that should not be missed.  

As long as COVID exists, we will face loss in the business. We are hoping that the business will keep on surviving and overcome the loss it is facing today. Before COVID, I was satisfied with the pace of my business. However, COVID-19 changed the whole business landscape of our country. It was not just us, many of my competitors and other businesses suffered from loss as well and they are still trying to recover from it. 

We haven’t lost any hope. We are constantly trying to reduce our operational losses and provide the products to our customers and vendors. I just hope my business survives this bad time and starts to operate like before.