Meet the Sheroes - Swarna Mohan

Swarna Mohan founded Lush Livings, a business dedicated to transforming home furnishings in 2010. It's interesting to hear about what inspired her to begin a business in home furnishing and how she developed her product range and service over the years, 

Read on to know the story of Lush Livings,

What is your business all about?

Lush livings focuses on transforming spaces with custom furnishings – custom curtains, rods, blinds and shades, custom upholstery including sofa, chairs, chaises and ottomans and custom bedding including pillows, mattresses, bed linen and headboards. We offer a wide, but unique range of fabrics that our customers can choose from to personalize their spaces.

Lush Livings started as an e-commerce site in 2010 based out of Texas and California selling custom curtains and valances. We were initially serving clients in United States and Canada. We now ship our products all over the world. We also offer design-consultation services  - through the web for remote clients and in-home consults for local clients. In October 2014, we opened our flagship store in Chennai, India.

What made you enter this line of work?

I always had an interest in interior decorating. During my engineering career at a Chip Design Software company, my husband and I moved around a lot for better prospects. My favorite part of moving was decorating our new home. My husband  challenged me with  stringent budgets to work with and I had to get creative to stay within that budget. Searching high and low for the right home accessories, fabrics and skilled labor helped me gain contacts that formed the building blocks of my business. I realized there was a market gap for a variety in offerings in the home furnishings segment and decided to start a business to meet this demand.

While continuing my career, I ran the business  in my spare time and grew it organically for a few years. It was a good learning experience for me. It helped me gain product knowledge and business skills,  experiment with different types of customers and identify our target market, optimize inefficiencies in our services, expand our product  portfolio. The extent of success in my business encouraged me to resign my full time job and focus on taking Lush Livings to the next level.

What are the challenges of being an entrepreneur as opposed to being in a job?

As an entrepreneur, I am challenged to wear many different hats – product design, marketing, budgeting, customer services – but I enjoy learning every aspect of managing a business.  This excites me as the success of my business is the direct outcome of my efforts and my decisions. 

While I am more susceptible to economic conditions as an entrepreneur than in a regular job, I have realized that adapting my business to changing needs will definitely help me survive through recessions. While my job gave me income security, being an entrepreneur allows me free reign to pursue my passion and interests.

What are the short-term business plans you have for Lush Livings?

We want to expand the reach of Lush Livings  in India and overseas through franchises. We are working on a simple franchise model  to encourage enterprising individuals to start a venture in home furnishings. This will not only help us expand our label, but it will also provide an opportunity for many women like me to pursue their artistic interests.

We will also be soon introducing our own signature curtain and upholstery fabric collections.

What marketing tricks do you follow for your company?

Approximately 50-60% of my business revenue is through online sales. Hence adding content regularly and making reasonable SEO to our website increases our online exposure and brings in potential customers. We also make our products  available through different online market places in addition to our website.

For our online customers, we send fabric samples so that they can see the fabric colors and textures in person before ordering a custom product. This helps customers to gain confidence in our quality and service.

We strive hard to make our customers happy and this has worked largely in our favor by bringing in many referrals.

Any last words of advice for the Sheroes

If you have a dream, follow it! You are the only one that has the drive and passion to make your idea work against all odds and that motivation will help you find your recipe for success.

When I was planning to start my business, my friends and family had many words of caution for me. Their intention was to help -- so they pointed out the risks and possibilities of failure. But I was clear of my passion and decided that I will not get bogged down by what can go wrong. Instead, I decided to take small steps and continue forward. With each success my confidence grew, and with each challenge, my determination to succeed grew further.