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Founder@ Interview
Interview with Shiv Misra & Ram Krishnan
“Don’t lose focus on your vision and be persistent. Know where your skills end and hire someone to do that for you. Talk to others about your idea and always talk to people who have done it. Learn from your past and use that knowledge to tweak things in the future.” – Shiv Misra & Ram Krishnan
Today we feature Shiv Misra & Ram Krishnan, the founder at Roots and Hoots. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
Roots & Hoots is co-founded by Shiv Misra, founder and owner of the ever-popular vegan and organic supermarket Kindly of Brighton, and Ram Krishnan, who runs a successful tech start-up innovating food waste recycling systems.
We are both equally passionate about the plastic pollution issue and want to provide an option to everyone who wants to move to a plastic-free and zero-waste lifestyle. We hope that we can play our part in encouraging more people to think twice about how their purchases affect the environment
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
I knew that we had to change our lifestyles if we were to do something about the growing issue of plastic. When I looked around my house, I saw a vast amount of single-use plastic that could be avoided, and that whilst some businesses offered products to lower your plastic-use, it wasn’t convenient, and neither was it cheap.
I wanted to do something to solve this problem and set up Roots and Hoots with a tech-savvy business partner in Ram.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
Roots & Hoots delivers vegan, plastic free groceries , personal care and cleaning products straight to our customer doors via eco-friendly electric vans and looks to eliminate waste through an exciting new closed loop system concept, utilising reusable packaging and refillable products.
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We are currently operating in Brighton and Hove and surrounding areas ( area of 20 miles radius) and plan to expand operations to wider area. We want to become the go to place where people come to shop in a sustainable way and do their bit for the planet while shopping
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
The brand was conceptualised in Dec 2019 but the kick off was delayed due to COVID. Has to pause the plan to focus on the other business and then restarted this in Aug 2020 and first delivery in Oct 2020 . Although we had good response from people who were aware of the brand and had a good rate of repeat customers, we were struggling to get new customers in. We did a major revamp of the website and launched a dedicated marketing campaign in the last month and that has helped with reaching out to new customers and new orders.
However , having said that, such an initiative will only be successful by large scale community participation and we still have a lot of ground to cover to achieve wider community awareness and participation
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
The biggest challenge to overcome was the lack of any business experience. There was also the challenge of getting people to accept this new way of shopping (when people are used to the comfort of selecting the packaged food from supermarkets).
The last fact was that we started this business in the middle of pandemic where people were very conscious of how we handle the food products and how many touch points were there while packaging.
In addition not to mention the fact that this is a very capital intensive business which needed a lot of capital outlay before we could launch
Get mentors and meet regularly
Mentors not only help you as a sound board but are also a great wat to avoid mistakes and grow your business. A mentor wouldn’t just offer you suggestions about whats the best course of action and would be fair in their assessment of the situation
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
Give it a go and don’t wait for your plan to be made perfect. Timing is key in business and even a 100% plan before start will have gaps that you cant foresee. Rather than trying to have a perfect plan with everything thought through, refine it as you go long. And more importantly be open to testing and trying along the way
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
Since we are a small team we want to make our operations as efficient as possible and since both the founders come from a technical background we realise the importance of using the right tools for all the key processes. If I were to pick 3 tools then I will pick the below:
Slack – for all internal communication as it not only helps with open communication it also helps share instant information with the whole team. we have dedicated slack channels for individual and key tasks which ensures that the whole team is on top of them.
Mail chimp – I am not even sure what the alternate is to using mail chimp, but that has been such a great tool in managing our email marketing that I cant even imagine life without it.
If we longer have access to this, then our email marketing will become very manual and might be error prone as well.
Shopify internal development tool – we are creating a bespoke app which helps us do quite a few functionalities that we need for operations for which an off the shelf product doesn’t exist. This has been such a boon as we would have spent too much time and effort to do these tasks manually instead.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
Get mentors and meet regularly
Mentors not only help you as a sound board but are also a great wat to avoid mistakes and grow your business. A mentor wouldn’t just offer you suggestions about whats the best course of action and would be fair in their assessment of the situation
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
When we got nominated in the top 5 sustainable business startup by Tech Round.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
To gain knowledge and resources which will help me make this business a success. Also i wanted to learn how i could get more people to try this new way of shopping. For such a new concept to take off, we need more people to try out the service and since this is such a niche field where many people do not have any previous experience, we have to take our customers through the journey.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
• Don’t lose focus on your vision and be persistent
• Know where your skills end, and hire someone to do that for you
• Talk to others about your idea and always talk to people who have done it
• Learn from your past and use that knowledge to tweak things in the future
• Accept that you will never know enough
• Cash is king and always have cash on-hand
• Invest in tools that give you more time as your time is more valuable than you think
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Roots and Hoots”
To learn more about Roots and Hoots Visit www.rootsandhoots.com
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