“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” ~ Virginia Woolf. On this International Women’s Day, GlobalSpa recognizes and celebrates the women in the industry as we delve into their success mantra they follow, mistakes that have helped them grow, and of course, their WELLNESS philosophy.

Susmitha Lakkakula is the founder of Cloud Tailor, a hyper personalized women’s wear space that aims at providing a digital solution to an offline tailoring problem.

What is your wellness philosophy?

Wellness is a multifaceted approach to living that applies to all areas of life, including physical, mental, social, spiritual, and emotional. Wellness is maintaining a stable lifestyle that allows you to continually improve these dimensions. It is more than just the absence of disease. It requires an all-round support. I am fortunate enough to have family support, which allows me to do what I love and also helps me to focus on other aspects of my life.

Your success mantra?

Marginal Improvements – Do small things every day. What stands between us and achieving our most ambitious dreams is not so much about talent as much as it is about how we approach problems and make decisions to solve them. I’ve lived in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and in both these high-tech, bustling cities, looking for a tailor, placing orders, following up, was a huge pain point. I looked around for a tech solution to simplify this workflow and found that no one had an end-to-end solution in this huge industry. This problem got me very excited. From the time I realised that this is the problem I wanted to solve, to launching Cloud Tailor in December 2020, I have been making marginal improvements every day to build the perfect online fashion and tailoring service for every woman.

A lesson you learned from making a mistake?

‘To do or not to do’ is an eternal question that all of us are facing while taking the most important decisions in life. We had initially planned to have Cloud Tailor as an aggregation model of tailors. We realised we had to have the order fulfilment cycle under our strict quality control instead of an aggregated model. That led us to the format of the hub and spoke of fulfilment model at Cloud Tailor.

Any piece of advice for all the women out there?

I live by my one statement which works wonders: Do things which you are afraid of doing and did not have the time to do for so long. Eg: Do the public speech you always loved and feared. Volunteer for your community. Take that bike trip to nowhere. Pick up the brush and paint your dream. Learn the new skills you always wanted. All of this will take you a step closer to making entrepreneurship a way of life for you. Life is too short to procrastinate.

What has been your biggest pride as a doyenne?

In 9 months, we have successfully delivered 12,000+ personalized fashion orders for women across India, US, UK, Australia and Singapore. Our repeat customer ratio is over 75% and average order value is already above the industry average. We have served customers starting from the age of 2 years to 55 years. This makes me feel like I’m helping women across the world to get the perfect outfit and I couldn’t be happier.