Today, we bring to you an interview with a young & dynamic fashion entrepreneur Natalie Birwadkar who sells affordable yet fashionable women’s wear through her online store “Loev Ouy”.
Intro
Natalie believes in the power of self-love which begins with self-care.
She started an online store of hers “Loev Ouy” to empower women to feel their best self every single day by including clothes made by empowered men and women who own small clothing business and have been working hard to keep their business running.
She believes that true empowerment begins by supporting and encouraging others to do their best and hence is currently using her platform and expertise to support small clothing stores owners around the world by providing them with a platform to sell their clothes during difficult times like these. Running physical stores can be expensive and risky and hence welcomes any business owner who believes and is working towards spreading self-love to join her.
She provides shipping worldwide and shipping within India is free and doesn’t charge any additional shipping charges, no matter where the client lives.
She continually adds new clothes to her site daily and is working on adding more products on her site apart from clothes.
Her vision is to make self-love and self-care go viral and wishes to use the profits gained into empowering and investing in talent who can help her achieve her mission and vision and bring it to reality.
In her interview with Girl On A Roll, she talks about her journey as a fashion entrepreneur.
Girl On A Roll: Tell us about your business and what services do you provide?
Natalie: The name of our online store is “Loev Ouy” (https://loev-ouy.company.site/) which when unscrambled becomes “Love You” because this is what we want the people who buy clothes from our online store to do, love and take care of themselves.
We currently just have women’s clothing on our site and are working towards adding clothes for men too, since self-love is not just something which women need to remind themselves but men too.
We believe that there is strength in being vulnerable and asking for help, both men and women aren’t weak for crying because we are all human irrespective of our caste, creed and gender, etc.
We are also working on adding more products to our site associated with self-love and self-care.
We want our customers to feel empowered when they wear these clothes made by empowered men and women, remind themselves to keep going in the face of darkness, reminding themselves of their strength and join hands to make self-love and self-care go viral alongside us.
Apart from that, the clothes on our site are very reliable and are of a really great quality, we have personally bought and tried out clothes from the manufacturers before we decided to feature their clothes on our online store, so the quality is really good and price of the clothes are also very reasonable and affordable
Girl On A Roll: How and why did you become an entrepreneur? Was it something you always intended for yourself?
Natalie: Ever since I was 18 years old, I always aspired to become an entrepreneur, not for
the money or fame but because this was the only way I knew I could have an impact on thousands of people at a time and that shaped my purpose in life “To make a difference in lives of others”.
Everything I did was always in alignment with it, it was helping others that genuinely truly made me happy, it is this that inspires me every single day to wake up and hustle as I genuinely want entrepreneur for the rest of my life, I am grateful to have the time, energy and passion that probably not many people have
and I genuinely would never take that for granted.
Girl On A Roll: How did you get where you are today? Tell us a little bit about your journey.
Natalie: I always knew that I was born to be an entrepreneur, but didn’t anticipate it to be right now.
My grandfather passed away in October 2019 however the news of his passing away didn’t go down well with my mother, she was devastated and a year later when we were all stuck at home and my mom was thinking of starting something of her own, I decided to help.
I wanted to help her get busy, do something she was passionate about, and feel good about the person she was and if my purpose in life was to make a difference in the lives of others, I might as well help my mom for she has done so much for me, so that is how we started and got where we are now today, we wanted to help ourselves by helping others, for that way we would look beyond our pain and remind ourselves that we weren’t alone.
Girl On A Roll: What or who has been your greatest influence in business and why?
Natalie: I’d question myself for days as to why am I here and if I weren’t alive would the world be any different?
The answer has always been no and that in itself keeps me going.
I feel like everyone here is for a reason and so am I. And the fact that I have nothing to lose right now makes me take every possible risk I can in life for I know that someday it will pay off and someday someone will not give up because of me just like I didn’t give up because of people I look up to.
Girl On A Roll: How do you achieve the work-life balance?
Natalie: I think when you are passionate about something the only thing you can think about is work.
So in that case it is very important to surround yourself with people who understand that, especially when you are a startup and have started out recently, work is what takes up the maximum amount of time but it is very important to maintain that balance.
You should not let those communication gaps drift you apart from people you love and care about. Not everyone thinks like you and the best way to convey what you feel or want to say is to just communicate.
Another thing that would help is this technique called ‘time-boxing‘, the time allotted for something as fun as watching a movie isn’t time wasted.
You can do everything you want in a day, all you have to do is ensure you plan out your day beforehand. We all get the same 24 hours in a day and just one life to live, we can be whoever we want to be in this life, all it takes is a few series of decisions, so make sure they are the right ones and are in alignment with the life you want to live.
Girl On A Roll: Do you think women feel intimidated in the world of business?
Natalie: If I talk about my mother, she did feel intimated when she decided she wanted to start a business
because she had a ton of other responsibilities like taking care of the household chores, family, etc.
I did watch a lot of Ted Talks wherein female entrepreneurs spoke about receiving less funding from VC’s only because of their gender, which is sad but it’s safe to say that the situation is improving because there are a lot more female entrepreneurs than they were earlier and it is they who inspire me to dream big.
Girl On A Roll: To what do you attribute your success?
Natalie: I am honestly very grateful to God, my parents for always supporting me.
No matter what I do and for encouraging me to do better, their feedback has always been very valuable to me and I hope that someday I am an asset to them instead of being a liability,( young, dumb, and broke), and of course tough times. Had I not had them I wouldn’t be the person I am today and started “Loev Ouy” alongside my mom.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with myself. The only thing that empowers me is when I wear clothes made by empowered men and women and that in itself is the feeling we want our customers to feel, that if these people could do it, we could too.
Being able to afford clothes, dream for yourself, love yourself, do everything you are passionate about, is all a thing we can afford, that they cant and that in itself causes that switch to be flipped from you to them and that switch when flipped you think about others and thus stops the overthinking.
A beginning of a legacy you create for others to follow, so empowering others through pain
is what we always aspire for and want our customers to feel and do the exact same way, accepting yourself
for who you are, knowing you are special and a good human being to have cared about others, the ones
struggling with finances and investing in helping them, that is why we are here functioning in spite of a ton
of competition and a heck of a lot of self-doubts.
Girl On A Roll: What is the biggest challenge you faced and what did you do to overcome it?
Natalie: For me it definitely was building everything from scratch especially in an industry I knew nothing
about.
I come from a healthcare background and had zero knowledge about the clothing industry, so I had
literally, watch tons of videos and read tons of articles of people who already own one to understand as to
how this industry works, then again finding and getting in touch with people who own small clothing stores
while working on my other passion projects was a struggle.
There were days when I would literally wonder as it to if I could even manage to pull it off, but ultimately when I decided to focus on the bigger picture instead of worrying, everything started to fall into place.
The only thing now our fear is not as to how to bring our ideas to reality but how to inspire as many people as we can to join us in this movement to promote self-love.
We add new products on our site daily and hope that soon the sales happens more organically so that we could also focus on adding new product categories apart from clothes on our site, provide a platform to
more small business owners, fashion designers to sell their products.
Ultimately once everything works out well in terms of finances we can invest in the talent and build a sustainable fashion industry alongside them.
Girl On A Roll: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be? What’s your biggest piece of advice for female entrepreneurs?
Natalie: While I may not be in the best position to answer this question, all I can say is that you got to keep
moving forwards no matter what.
In times of uncertainty, failure and success, just believe that everything is working out in your favor.
you will feel lonely, desperate, impatient, angry, either way, you have to inspire yourself to get back up, live as if every day is your last because someday when it is your last day on earth you will die with memories and having left a legacy behind for others to follow and not dreams and regrets.
You can Check Natalie’s online store here : https://loev-ouy.company.site/