I lost my father at a very early stage of my life. I was only in class 10 and that’s when I had to step up, and look after my family and start my own business. I started Sobuj Footwear in 1998. A close relative of mine was in the footwear industry for a long time. I started working with him and after around 6 months, I decided that I can start and launch my own business.

Since then, Sobuj Footwear has been running smoothly. I took a loan of around 15 lac taka from a bank to grow my business. And after a lot of struggle I was able to make more than 1 lac tk of profit per month with average sales of 50K per day. I sell my shoes mostly to wholesale buyers. For 4-5 years I was even able to export shoes to Saudi Arabia. And I managed the entire business with around 20-25 employees. One of the biggest barriers I faced and still  facing is adapting to the advanced technology of this industry. Most of our shoes are still handmade. Besides, the machines we use aren’t advanced either. The problem here is the lack of funding for small business owners like me. Without enough funding it becomes difficult for us to have enough profit to afford advanced technology enabled machines. But still, we are able to make profit from our business. 

However, due to COVID, my business suffered great loss. Compared to the 1 lac taka of average monthly profit, we now have just 20 thousand taka of monthly average profit. My customers started to reduce their order quantity and the wholesale market was also suffering from a great loss during this period. However, having said that, I never felt like my business would shut down due to COVID. I kept on going. I have around 20 lac taka of receivables from different clients. I started collecting them slowly when my business was suffering losses. I even cut down my employees number from 20-25 to 8-10. 

I got a lot of support from different NGOs and consulting companies like LightCastle. LightCastle visited my area to provide training to different SME owners like us. Other organizations like SwissContact and Poppy foundation supported us in many ways as well. We received massive discounts and funding for buying machineries in our area because of organizations like these. As long as there are organizations like these helping the SME owners, we hope to grow our business rapidly in the future. 

As for my future plans, I am currently trying to gather funding and use that to increase my production level and efficiency. I already have a lot of connections with the market. But slowly and gradually, I hope to grow my business rapidly with increasing profit margin by increasing the efficiency.