Dear Big-shot, here’s what nobody bothered to tell you.

It was mid 2014. I was fixated on making my next transition to a fashion-house, an apparel manufacturing giant if you will. That had been on the agenda forever. One name popped up over and over again, in all my young research. This name was behind every big brand manufactured in India.

The name on the shirt says a brand, but the manufacturer is this Indian name of a huge mill company. They manufacture all the important brands that we buy off the stores in India. Anyone worth manufacturing ie. Their orders are of the order of thousands of thousand units and no you couldn’t get them to print your stock of 100 T-shirts as a startup.

As someone looking to put her foot in the door, in the big world of apparel manufacturing in the year 2008, this company would fascinate me. I wouldn’t leave a stone unturned to find someone who worked there and could connect me to someone else who could give me a job at their factory. What I wouldn’t give to see the garments in making at those imagined mammoth factories.

Only in my imagination, I could hear 1000s of sewing machines, rhythmically making a constant hum, similar to a train wheels on the tracks yet distinct of its own steps. The dry-ish atmosphere, with a lot of smell of fresh fabric, and the air thick with cotton strands flying around. Hard to breathe for most people, was dream-like foggy for me.

And yet, in 2014, I finally sat across someone who knew a lot of people in the same organisation and they were looking for someone like me who understood online as well as the world of fashion (:P) to manage and launch their new “initiative” where they wanted to go “online”. Here’s the deal, a new word, omni-channel, had made its way into the world of retailers. Everyone who was offline, wanted to be online and vice versa. Which basically meant everyone was everywhere. One channel, one single fluid channel for customers to be baffled about you.

The idea was, that they were thinking that they too should be online. With their own sub-label and their own online presence, a platform where you could order custom attire for yourself. And then if you wanted you could go for a fitting in one of their offline stores, or pick up from there, etc. The only problem was, they had no clue.

They wanted to hire people, but they didn’t know where to start, what to look for etc. For some fortunate reason, I did not get moved by the name of the organisation, or let my rationality be overwhelmed by the fact that they were practically a childhood dream. I decided I wanted to continue starting up, to my next venture and to next, until I find my humble place in the big universe.

Next thing I heard, from an IIM graduate, next year they were still hiring for this initiative. Some of them would join in mid 2015 and then ensure that their omni-channel dreams see reality. A year after their brilliant team was finally in place, and a tech (product) team of 150 employees, they are finally out with their first version.

Don’t even get me started on their first version, and how their absolutely decade old un-responsive navigation bar makes me cringe!

So what’s wrong with this #e7e7e7 grey nav bar? Nothing! If you are two students sitting in your hostel room, trying to “hack-together” this web-app that would be cool to have in 2005?

Here’s what’s wrong with this. It took them an outsourced vendor and then a team of 150 odd tech staff plus a few MBAs and two years to finally come up with this. We could only guess the budgets that they spared for their little pet project. And all this while, we crib about the burn rates of e-commerce giants that have changed the face of Indian shopping market in less than a decade.

To give you the perspective, it took one team of 3, out of which only one guy codes to come up with this in 30 days. Another team of 5 starting a company in 2015, and creating something like this in less than a year, with two patents filed for the technology they built under minimal resources. And how much money they might have burnt? Less than half a million USD, both put together. And they are both revenue positive, progressive companies which are already lean.

They both started, built, and served hundreds of customers in less time than it took a big organisation to even put together a team. The names of these companies are Urban Tailor and Preksh, fyr.

Finally, here’s what’s also wrong with this: To first kill the idea to death by overthinking it, then create committees which will then spearhead the operations of such a program, and then to depend entirely on a “vendor” to deliver what you should have built in-house, and then to open a mini software company at your premise; building something that was unique 10 years ago. And in all likelihood these 150 employees will be let go at some point in time, as someone would trim their losses in search for A strategic fit and no one will even hear about it.