Amruta Vasant Mangale is chasing a Rs 10-crore dream — the turnover she expects this financial year. “I have crossed Rs 7.5 crore already,” says Amruta, the founder and director of Pune-based Hindavi Solution Private Limited that manufactures a range of adhesives under the brand name Beestofix.

In November, Amruta won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 award given by London-based Youth Business International, an organisation that works in 65 countries to enable young people in difficult situations to realise their business ideas.

Beestofix’s mainstay is manufacturing BOPP (Biaxially Oriented Polypropylene) tape adhesive, paint binders and emulsion, textile, paper and leather binder and emulsion, paper and packaging industries adhesive, construction chemicals, synthetic resin adhesive and synthetic rubber adhesive for wood and furniture industries, colour pigment for BOPP tape industries and printing ink for industries such as paper and plastic packaging.

It supplies these to B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) markets and also provides printing ink.

“In 2018, as I was carrying out market research, I found out that Pune has a large packaging industry but there was a gap — all the adhesive was brought in from tape manufacturers out of Maharashtra. The companies that produced adhesives catered to foreign rather than local markets. I decided to start a business making adhesive,“ says Amruta.

The plant was set up in March 2019 and sent out its first batch of consignments.

It was last year that the company began to produce colour pigments and printing ink. At present, Beestofix manufactures 10 tonnes of industrial adhesive every day, 1,500 kg of printing ink and 5,000 kg of colour pigment every month.

“Even today, I make sales calls myself. I ask potential clients to take as much product as they want for free and pay me if they appreciate it,” she says.

Her investments have also largely been funds borrowed from her father-in-law, her husband and other family members as well as raised by selling her wedding jewellery.

“Because my turnover in 2018-19 was Rs 4 lakh, a drop from Rs 13 lakh in the previous financial year, as the manufacturing plant was set up, no bank was giving me a loan at the starting stages. I started with my own investment, with loans from family and an unsecured personal loan. Eventually, it was Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST), a platform for young people in India to turn their business ideas into profitable ventures, which helped me secure a Rs 20 lakh loan from a bank,” says Amruta.

Her journey reflects the experiences of entrepreneurs who enter the industry without any business background in family or education. Amruta has adapted quickly — when her retail outlet for CCTVs installation was not doing well in 2016, she learned the ways of e-commerce and turned her entire business into an e-commerce platform. In three months, she sold her entire inventory.

“As a woman, I know that it is difficult for girls to enter a tough chemical manufacturing business. I could get this far only because my father, a headmaster, had raised me to be ambitious and enterprising, and my husband and in-laws supported me through the difficult phases,” she says. Next, Amruta plans to make Beestofix a dominant player in the market and “generate employment for 5,000 people”.

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