How this Chemistry Teacher turned Entrepreneur launched her venture into Premium Skincare Products
A Chemistry teacher by profession, Priyanka Yagnik kickstarted her venture Phenak India which offers premium beauty and cosmetic products.
It’s Storytime
Our entrepreneur loves to teach and that’s what she has been doing ever since she passed her high school. She firmly believes that students should be taught with hands-on practical experiments for better understanding.
The story of Phenak India begins when in one chemistry class Priyanka decided to do a practical of SAPONIFICATION PROCESS with her students as a part of class 10th Chemistry syllabus. So, they just went through different books, followed their instructions and made a bar of soap.
As her students had actively participated she handed over the pieces of soap to them. Surprisingly, she got a call from one of her students’ mothers that she is feeling much better after using the soap as she had an uphill struggle with skin problems. Her kid might have forced her to try the soap made by him out of excitement.
Afterwards, Priyanka got to know that the mother had used the entire piece of soap and by the end, her itchiness had completely gone. This was the day when she started researching about the soaps relentlessly and laid the foundation of her venture. They made quite a few batches of soaps and experimented on themselves.
Major challenges
Priyanka’s entrepreneurial journey has not been without hurdles and obstacles. As being a handmade company, one of the biggest challenges was to procure the raw materials in small quantities. This is where they struggled a lot during the beginning, but they never compromised on the quality of raw materials used in their products.
The entrepreneur has always been vocal for local because she believes that what we can find locally is best for us as we are living in that environment and everything favourable grows in that area.
“Buying local and Indian products also stabilizes our Indian economy, it supports our food producers aka Farmers,” says Priyanka.
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Since she made her products in India with most of her raw materials are of Indian origin she even changed her company’s name to “Phenak India”.
For any business, Maintaining a long list of repeated customers is the biggest achievement. Priyanka proudly acclaims that she has maintained a huge amount of repeated customers. Most of them have been regularly buying the products since 2017 when she began her journey as Phenak India.
The entrepreneur says, “The customers are the real marketing assets that we lovingly have, as they often recommend our products to their near and dear ones who in turn to become our regular customers.”
Being an entrepreneur and a teacher Priyanka would love to tell all her fellow women entrepreneurs to “Decide what kind of work they want to do and then say no to everything else that isn’t that. Working hard is the only way to succeed. And you would be surprised how many things fall into place on their own when you learn to follow your spirit and chase your goal.”
