This Canadian handbag designer turned her failing career into a successful one

TStreet Media
FrontRow Magazine
Published in
3 min readNov 23, 2017

Sneha Varma is a handbag designer hailing from Ontario, Canada, who proved that failure is an opportunity. She failed the accounting exam thrice but refused to give up on her dreams, took a break and chose the most appropriate career path for herself. She proved that one just needs to react at the right time to the right stimuli and you’ll be on the road to success in no time.

Fear of failure holds one back

It usually happens that the fear of failure holds us back and we are afraid of fulfilling our aspirations and chasing our dreams. The story is quite different for Sneha Varma; she climbed the ladder of success only after going through constant failure.

Get to know the background of Ms. Varma

The young designer is of Indo-Mauritian and French-Canadian descent and hails from the outskirts of Ontario. She has a background in accounting and finance and unlike her profession, no formal degree in fashion design or handbag design.

Varma, while giving an interview to Fashion magazine stated that she had to pick up a subject to study in high school. At that point in time, it wasn’t a type of environment where she would’ve thought that getting paid for her creativity would be encouraged. Therefore, she opted for accounting as her main subject. She chose this direction because she believed she was good with numbers.

Varma failed the accountancy exam

She studied economics at the University of Toronto and started working at a public accounting firm. Meanwhile, she started the study for her chartered accounting designation. According to Varma, the process for the exam was very gruelling because the exam consisted of a three-day series and one gets to attempt it only once a year for a maximum of four times. The designer gave it three chances to pass before finally quitting but she failed all of them.

She agrees that admitting the failure is hard

Varma says that she doesn’t really like admitting the fact that she failed all three attempts. She believes it was crazy since she was working really well at the audit firm and also got to train other people due to her good performance. It was still difficult to figure out the reason for her failure.

The designer finally took the failure as an opportunity

After some deep thoughts and analysis, she decided to not let herself down by this temporary storm. She took some time out and looked at all that was happening as an opportunity to take a break from her routine life and figure out what she actually wanted. It was during that break that she got inspired by Oprah Winfrey while watching an episode of her show. The episode of the show opened new thinking perspectives for her mind and she decided to go on with the fashion design field.

h/t: Fashion Magazine
Also available on Zyne.ca

--

--

TStreet Media
FrontRow Magazine

TStreet Media is the publishing arm of Toast Studio (@gotoast), a content agency located in lovely Montreal, Canada.