India’s First Reusable Packaging Solution For Brands To Protect The Environment
ECOVIA was founded by Dhwani Mehta, Pranjul Jain and Parikshit Joon in 2021 with the sole purpose of reducing the plastic material used in packaging online purchases.
Recently India became the third country to have its 100th unicorn and it is pretty clear that India is catering to an optimistic atmosphere for varieties of start ups. Largely after Covid-19, e-commerce start ups have recorded a surge and one of them is ECOVIA.
ECOVIA was established on January 2021, which was the result of hard work and one of the best startup’s solution to save our planet and money too, by Dhwani mehta – Co-founder and also the CEO of this sustainable brand, with Pranjul Jain as COO and Parikshit Joon as CTO. And it focuses on D2C (Direct-to -consumer ) brands, offering them sustainable packaging solutions.
Dhwani, the CEO of ECOVIA, was born and brought up in Surat , and went to the UK at the age of 18 to pursue a degree in Economics from Warwick University. In a recent interview she says, “I grew up being heavily influenced by my father, who was involved in the business. Even at university, all the internships I opted for were geared towards enabling me to become an entrepreneur.” With this she nurtured a dream of being an entrepreneur.
Soon Dhwani started working at various startups in the UK to get an idea of various aspects of running a successful business. After a year when she returned back to India, she chose to work with a health-tech care startup and then with a fashion-tech company before starting ECOVIA.
India had gone through the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 which left its effect till now. Under this situation, “pandemic threw light on how dependent we all are on various e-commerce platforms” stated Dhwani.
“From our daily essential commodities like milk and bread to the more luxurious purchases. Overall the most important thing which bothered all of us was the packaging material and sheer waste that our purchase was accompanied by” and therefore, all of these things were the reasons for Dhwani to come up with this wonderful idea, which led to the establishment of ECOVIA.
Initially, all three co-founder invested lakhs of their own money, before raising some angel funding. Dhwani stated that over one year the company has signed on more than 25 brands and by March 2021, they shipped tens of thousands of orders.
After that Dhwani and his team member started discussion over every brand and also they started talking to the consumers to find a solution to the packaging that was being used. It also helped to have a very environmentally conscious brand and consumers. “That drove us to want to find a viable solution,” says Dhwani. There are also sustainability-focused market places that have sprung up in the past. Pranjul says, “over the last few years, the awareness on recycling has increased manifold. But, while we celebrate this awareness in the right direction, we need to keep working towards the best.
Recycling requires energy and extra resources while also being a huge source of pollution. On the contrary, a recent report by the World Economic Forum states that the circular economy has the power to shrink global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 39 percent and cut virgin resource use by 28 percent. Furthermore, we don’t even have enough recycling facilities to cater to the growing waste.
“We at Ecovia, find more value in reusing rather than recycling,” says Dhwani. Taking this brand forward, the brand also rewards its customers for returning the packaging material. As a co-founder, she states that close to 40 percent of her time goes into finding the right fit for the various roles at the organization. She says that it is important to find people who enjoy the work they are doing and also contribute meaningfully to the advancement of the company. The other important point she points at is dealing with uncertainty. “No matter how good the plan looks on paper, it is only as good as its implementation. Covid-19 in that sense was a huge teacher. We all learnt so many lessons while dealing with it,” she says.
Credit: The Better India
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by shyma
