Hey,
hope you’ve had a great week!
I’ll try to keep this letter short because I have been recently told that I write really, really long emails, and people might not want to read them. But, I request you to give this letter a read because it is an important one :)
Last month was phenomenal for us (i.e. Perfora) as a brand and as a business. Well, overnight Perfora became a lot more known, all because of our Shark Tank India feature. From being a brand that only a few people knew about, it became “someone” that a lot more people could recognise.
Literally, hundreds of thousands of people placed an order to try our products from different mediums and it suddenly felt like there is next level of acceptance for our brand. Thank you so much to you and to everyone who believes in our story. We are very grateful.
For people who ordered our products on the website and subscribed to our emails recently, we write a newsletter pretty much every Sunday sharing a little about our journey behind the scenes, perspective on life, business building, work culture, the “why” behind a decision or a new product, etc.
Coming back to this newsletter, I want to talk a little about the people who make the magic happen behind the scenes. As a founder, I might get a lot of recognition and validation for what I’m building at Perfora, however, in reality, my contribution to building this brand or business is very limited.
It’s the people who are an integral and important part of the team who are truly hustling day in and day out and are working round the clock to build the business.
These guys are the ones who will ensure that if there are a hundred things to be done to deliver an exceptional customer experience, they will go all out to make it happen. They won’t look at the time of the day or what day (including Sunday) is it of the week to address all customer concerns.
For context, I want to share about a few people on our team.
Below is the picture of Drishti, who is an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) and leads our D2C business.
That is Drisht Singhal, one of our earliest team members.
As you can see, she is sitting on the floor sorting out boxes in the warehouse and working alongside 100+ men. This is not a typical visual for a couple of reasons -
1. Her role is to ensure that we get traffic on the website, customers are placing orders on the website, strategizing on the marketing, and a lot more on the business side but nothing even remotely related to visiting the warehouse and helping in dispatching orders. Yet, she spent more than half of her last week in the warehouse to ensure that all the order backlog is cleared and contribute in whatever she could. Probably, the only reason she did this is that she is really obsessed with customer satisfaction.
2. She wasn’t asked or requested by me or any other team member to visit the warehouse and get her hands dirty. And she is fully aware that in the warehouse, there won’t be a single woman around and there is a possibility that she might feel uncomfortable but she didn’t give a damn because for her to scale the D2C channel, customers are super important.
That is Vigya Vini, a 6’2 tall and fun guy who believed in us.
Another picture here is of Vigya, who leads our operations and comes with 11+ years of experience. Again, he, himself is on the shop floor ensuring all the toothbrush boxes count for dispatch is correct. Honestly, as a founder, I don’t expect him to be on the floor and to be counting boxes but ever since our brand was on national television, he has been in the warehouse, spending more than 12-14 hours a day and getting things done. There have been days where he started his day at 10:30 am at the warehouse and left the warehouse as late as 5 am after the target for the day was completed. BTW, he has a team of 5+ people that directly reports to him and a team of 14+ people in the warehouse that indirectly reports to him and yet he himself is lending his hand to get things done.
Since I was requested to keep the newsletter short, I won’t be able to talk about the contributions of Raghav, Jyotsna, Manoj, Mridu, Amarsh, Rashika, Sonu and so many other people in our team who are the real heroes and doers. These guys will be future entrepreneurs and will be building something incredible over the next few years. Watch out for them. Super proud of everyone ♥️
Lastly, I am aware some of our customers are disappointed and frustrated with us because their order was shipped out late or they received their order incomplete, or something inaccurate was delivered to them. My sincere apologies for all the inconvenience caused to you and I hope you can give us another chance. We are committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience as we adjust to this new scale of operations.
And I hope you can continue to trust us as we are working really hard to fulfill the expectations of all our customers. Please have some faith and we won’t run away with your money :p
Here is a glimpse of what our warehouse looked like during the second half of last month.
Our partner warehouse on the outskirts of Gurugram filled with Perfora boxes everywhere.
If you have any feedback or concerns, please write to me by replying to this email and I’ll personally look into it.
Let’s keep building - onwards and upwards!
Warmly,
Jatan