Last Friday I completed one more trip around the sun. Well I'm no astronaut, I was just referring to my birthday and another 365 days in my life on Earth. Going around the sun comes as a free trip from mother Earth. It was another great year, few accomplishments, learnings and lot of great memories.
My greatest friend surprises me every birthday with something special. This time he had sent me 2 books and 2 t-shirts. One was "Turning points" by A.P.J.Abdul Kalam. Finished it over the weekend and had a lot of inspiring stories and learnings from him and I thought why don't I start sharing some interesting articles I read in my kutty stories.
While APJ is an inspiration for the nation and many would have read about him. Let me talk about someone I seldom knew about and this was one book that impressed me a lot, a youth who had the thought and the will power to make it big in the retail industry. "The Big Baazar" man Kishore Biyani. His book : "It Happened in India" tells, the Story of Pantaloons, Big Bazar, Central and the Great Indian Consumer.
There was one interesting narration about how they failed trying to sell white shirts. His team had done a market research and figured out that every Blue collared working man would have at least one white shirt in his ward robe. So the team decided to manufacture white shirts in bulk and put them on sale. To their astonishment their sales didn't pick up. After a couple of months they realized the stock was piling up and something was wrong in their market research.
When they tried analyzing the problem they realized the reason for the failure. It was a fact that everyone will buy a white shirt, but the problem was in its pricing. No it was not costly, but rather very cheap. In the Indian context low price means cheap and is associated with low quality. So customers saw the price and thought the quality was bad. And hence their sales didn't pick up.
Now their stock was piling up and white shirts are not the best to stock as it can get dirty and can soon loose it's value or worth. The team approached Kishore. His advice to the team was, when you know you have made a mistake, realize it and quickly cut your losses. So he ordered the price to be slashed further and cut further loss. The stock vanished in no time.
At times we are stuck with bad decisions in life. Sometimes it's not worth burdening ourselves with it and living with the problem. If you can't fix it, is it worth minimizing your losses. If not move on, we can gain what we lost another day or on another occasion. This learning has helped me effectively make some tough calls and get out of the worst situations.
That's my kutty story for the fortnight, if there was an inspiring book or story you have share it as a comment or blog.