Shreya DalelaCo-founder of Speaking Walls Published On: Friday, November 20, 2015 Views 4863

"How you see yourself determines everything."

One of the most crucial aspects for any aspiring entrepreneur is to make the best use of the opportunities and people around them. Rather than sitting around for thing to happen they tend to experience and learn from mistakes. The same is the case with Shreya Dalela who has always been extremely motivated about being a social entrepreneur.

Along with keen interest in generating meaningful online content, she also has a good knowledge and experience of presenting, programming, designing and social media marketing. Her aim is to utilize her skills to create better lives for people. Over the course of her career, she has launched two startups, Happiness Heroes and Speaking Walls. She along with Anup Dutta, Mohit Dave, Nitish Rajpurohit, Bibek Sutradhar, Khushboo Singh,Shradha Agarwal, Priyanka Choudhury and Ipshita Biswas want to make Speaking Walls a one-stop hub for designer artworks like fan art posters and tees.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Speaking Walls is a designer merchandise marketplace that sells artworks, fan art posters and tees. We also do customized wall-decor projects for cafes, restaurants and offices. We sell through our website www.speakingwalls.in

We our growing our designer base everyday and artists of all genre are welcome to join us.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

It started when I was in third year of my college in NIT Silchar, Assam. I knew friends who were getting posters from their home towns to decorate their walls after semester vacations and me and my friend Ipshita Biswas thought why not start designing and delivering posters in college campus. We spoke to Anup Dutta, whom we knew was freelancing through his designing skills and he took up the idea really enthusiastically. We thought of company name Speaking Walls and created the page. Hence, the idea was born.

What is your life mantra?

How you see yourself determines everything.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

Starting out fresh out of college takes a lot of courage and not being experienced enough with anything brings you to a point where there are new challenges every other day. Yet, that is the fun part. As a team, we have faced a lot of challenges. First one is related to Logistics. We had a really tough time getting our first few orders delivered on time and in perfect condition. We had no idea about which courier services were good for us, our packaging was not perfect and delivering frames was a huge challenge. Yet, as I write this, I am proud to say that all our orders delivered today were on time and in perfect condition. Second biggest challenge was to take the courage to quit our jobs, convince our parents and follow this entrepreneurial team. Today, we are a team of eight and we are more than happy we left our jobs to take this forward.

Speaking Walls Team

How did you overcome those challenges?

After a lot of brainstorming, we have shifted to logistics aggregator service that has made it easier for us to ship and deliver on time in perfect condition.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

Till now, me and co-founders Anup Dutta, Mohit Dave and Nitish Rajpurohit have pooled in our resources to get the company to what it is today. We are in talks with investors for our first round of funding.

How do you protect yourself from the problem of Brain Drain?

The question does not hold relevance with regard to our team size right now.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Commitment : Its the toughest thing to go on when you wake up and there is a pile of problems to solve. There are times when nothing makes sense. Its the easiest to quit. But from my experience I have seen, that if you consistently make efforts, things only get better from there.

Trust : You can not grow if you do not trust your team. You have to believe that they want the company to grow as much as you want it to. Sure enough, their views or way of working may differ, but without putting faith in them you will reach nowhere.

Love : You have got to do what you love. That’s the only way you are going to make it through the toughest times and you have to got to BELIEVE in it even if no one else does.

Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?

Shiprocket for Logistics, Zoho Mail for company mail service, Hostpreneur for Hosting and Wunderlist for organising team work.

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Reading a random page from Rhonda Byrne’s The Power everyday or listening/watching something motivational.

Share any one habit which you wish to change in yourself.

Not being able to follow the schedule of getting up early everyday. Yes, it’s going to happen someday

Answer in less than 50 words

One tip to success:

Do not give up when things get super hard.

One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Self-doubt

One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

You must spend time learning something relevant to your business every day. Do not forget to up-skill.

What are your plans for next 3 years?

I want Speaking Walls to become the first brand that comes to people’s minds when they think of wall decor ideas. We want to have beautiful offline stores and premium locations and we want to collaborate with designers all over the world and introduce international shipping very soon.

If you get a chance to start your career again what would you do differently this time?

Nothing. No regrets so far.