Here are 10 couples who found success in the Small and Medium Business world. These husband-wife entrepreneur couples found success via their shared values, trust, and effective communication.
Valentine’s Day is all about acknowledging your trust and attachment and small business partnerships require the same skills. Just like a life relationship, in a business partnership, there needs to be good communication and trust factor among both the co-founders.
When life partners start a small business together, blend their strengths to become unstoppable. We interviewed 10 husband-wife startups with successful SMBs and found out what makes them click.
On this Valentine’s Day, we celebrated the many SMBs founded by a husband and wife.
Meet Siddhesh Sharma and Bhavna Anand Sharma from Cureveda
One of the many successful husband-wife duos that run a business. Bhavna and Sameer found a niche in the health supplement market but felt overwhelmed with traditional standards of drug production methods. Their premium range of supplements includes herbs along with clinical validation.
In 2014, Bhavna and Siddhesh Sharma launched their successful small business. Cureveda specializes in herbal remedies that are guaranteed organic and provide a natural cure for anything from headaches to cramps.
Cureveda’s line of therapeutic products provides solutions for common ailments like diabetes, heart health, and thyroid problems. Their most popular products include those that address those problems.
With their business expertise and a family partnership, some husband-wife duos seem to have achieved success in running a small business. For example, Sameer who was personable and articulate, credit his background with the Baidyanath family and gave the business a springboard into a world of herbs.
Meet Priyanka and Nagesh, founders of the Fruzzante brand
At the moment, Indian consumers are shifting beyond red wine and exploring many more types, such as white and sparkling wine, cider-style alcoholic beverages (alco-bev), as well as other types. These shifts may be due to a variety of reasons including millennial lifestyle shifts or changing demographics.
Going a step further, entrepreneur couple Priyanka Save and Nagesh Pai have created something new in the global market: chikoo-based alco-beverages.
Due to the nature of chikoo which is to ferment so it is not packageable so they opted to launch the cider-style drinks. After so many trials the product was launched.
In a single year 25K bottles were produced and today Fruzzamte winery is established in Maharashtra’s Bordi.
Geetha Nagu and Nagu Chidambaram of the nagus
With a great deal of experience running successful SMBs, the well-known entrepreneur duo of Nagu Chidambaram and Geetha Nagu has built thriving SMBs in the auto ancillary business, affordable housing, and Kamala Theatre.
The entrepreneurial duo has shown how innovation can be a game-changer and how family SMBs can be transitioned.
Reformation of family run Kamala theatre into an experience centre in the time of malls was not at all easy. They wanted to stick to their family business also so they built a multiplex in just 100 days.
Meet Chumbak founders Vivek Prabhakar and Shubhra Chadda – a Mumbai-based husband-wife duo who run their own B2C brand.
Shubhra Chadda and Vivek Prabraham, founders of Chumbak designs, are just two of the many husband-wife duos running successful SMBs. The couple started their company in 2010 by selling their apartment to fund the venture.
This husband-wife team began by selling souvenirs, but now they offer phone cases, jewellery boxes, laptop sleeves and more in their store.
The couple had grown bored with the usual marble Taj Mahals replicas as souvenirs. So they decided to bring something that represented India in a hip way, which led to the creation of Chumbak in 2010.
The founders of Chumbak say that they have consequently diversified into newer categories of accessories and fragrances.They have plan to open multiple stores every year in all the cities of India.
Meet Ankur Gupta and Akshita Gupta, the husband-wife duo behind ABL Workspaces.
ABL Workspaces, founded by husband and wife duo Ankur and Akshita Gupta in 2017, reflects the shift in traditional occupations that drove a movement to coworking spaces.
India’s coworking space provider, which is India’s first not-for-profit workspace provider, has flourished with a total of 10 centers. Starting out with one in Delhi six years ago, it now boasts 2,700 seats. With prices anywhere from 6 grand to 16k per month, the space has expanded beyond Delhi and the staffers hope customers will come in soon.
In today’s booming Small and Medium Businesses there is a huge demand of co-working spaces so they have around ten spaces in Noida and Delhi. Their clients include Livspace, Bira, Zomato, etc.
Ankur and his wife have fund some of their business expense with both their personal savings and investments. Further they raised structured funding in 2021 to spread their boundaries beyond Delhi region.
Meet husband and wife founders, Shikhar and Nidhi of Samosa Singh, the husband and wife pair that is changing the catering scene in Silicon Valley
When wife-husband duo Nidhi Singh and Shikhar Singh sat around their kitchen table after their wedding, the discussion was repeatedly coming back to snack food – samosas. It was then they decided to quit their day jobs, start an innovative samosa company with a namesake brand, Samosa Singh.
This husband-wife duo soon needed to move to a larger and mechanized kitchen after corporate orders started adding up. The choice was to either sell their flat or raise risk capital at a high stock dilution.
They sold their flat and invested money into their business. Today Samosa Singh can handle the order size of 10K samosas a day.
Read about Chirand and Hetal Virani, a duo who founded Sparkle
Menstruation is a topical concern in rural and semi-urban regions of India, a sentiment driven by the lack of access to quality products to improve menstrual health. Husband and wife duo, Chirag and Hetal Virani employ technology-driven practices to work towards solving these issues
Producing eco-friendly sanitary napkins is a noble cause, which was the primary motivation to start the business. After helping women around the world care for themselves, they extended their mission by donating a sanitary pad every purchase. Started in 2017, ‘Sparkle’ has already helped save thousands of customers.
Till date, they have sold more than 50,000 pads. The upper cost is around Rs.24 and they launched it in Rs.9.99 per pad. This is a noble cause and they use banana fibre to make these biodegradable products.
Meet Rohit and Purvi Pugalia – cofounders of Muchilicious
Rohit Pugalia was working at a stockbroking firm in Kolkata. Between meals, he craved for a snack, and often resorted to the more unhealthy options. He became dismayed by the number of unfavorable options considering what he believed to be the quality of life. Rohit had done MBA in Finance so he had a good hold on the business.
Purvi – Rohit’s wife, used to send extra snack boxes but it added to the bulk. The others in his office also had the same story.
In almost all the offices, it is the same case – Rohit realized about the midday cravings and that time there were not too many healthy options as well. Today their company has 200+ stores in the parts of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Delhi. In 2019 they made their way to Singapore.
Read about Rohan and Swati Bhargava co-founders of Cashkaro
Two college friends, Rohan Bhargava and Swati Bhargava founded a business, Pouring Pounds. The couple first met in their very late twenties and eventually married as they continued to see success in the cashback industry. Riding on the increased internet connectivity and increase of retail stores due to economic turn-around after liberalization, the couple’s ISP computer science degree helped them launch an email marketing company that focused on sending promotional emails.
In 2013 they launched CashKaro, a one-stop destination for savings across 1,500+ e-commerce sites. After raising $750,000 from UK investors, they launched Gurgaon-based CashKaro in India in April 2013.
CashKaro is one of the largest cashback sites in India with over 4 million users and five million page views a month. For the one commission model, CashKaro users get up to 30 percent additional cashback when they shop on its affiliate sites
Meet Bharath Patil and Radhika Patil of Cradlewise
A startup based in Bengaluru that considered ‘child-play’ to be a serious business. Co-founder Radhika Patil while finishing her master’s in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru met her future husband, Bharath. They started the company together.
Radhika said – as a mother she used to experience a lot of challenges as it is really difficult for a mother to play both roles efficiently at the office and home at the same time.
So she with the complete support of her husband decided to enter in the startup world. They wanted to launch some childcare solutions that can be helpful to all.
Their product NiNi provides parents with a modern cradle that includes all the features including a heated mattress. The product cost is 25,000 rupees and is also available on a rental mode.