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Gratia — the
thing women like
Yaroslava and
Marian are a married couple, at the age of about forty, who live in Ivano-Frankivsk with
their two children in a two-bedroom apartment. They both are engineers-constructors and
worked for a long time in one of Ivano-Frankivsk research institutions. However, recently
they faced considerable difficulties, for their employers, as well as many other employers
in Ukraine, stopped paying salary to their employees. By chance they met a person from
Lithuania, who offered them to sell women underwear in the market place or among their
acquaintances.
Then Yaroslava recalled her old dream to become a fashion
designer, but since there was no relevant school in Ivano-Frankivsk, she became an
engineer. Having analyzed the market for women underwear, Yaroslava and Marian saw an
opportunity to not only sell women underwear but also sew it for sell by themselves. The
family had a regular sewing machine at home. So they used the same contacts in the Baltic
State to obtain fabric and started to sew underwear. They sewed only the simplest models
and only by individual orders because it is hard to earn one’s living with a regular
sewing machine.
That is why they faced a necessity to expand the business because
their products enjoyed high demand. They had to find the necessary finance. Such an
opportunity appeared after the Ukrainian-Canadian Joint Venture SBEDIF Business Center
started to operate in Ivano-Frankivsk.
After the SBEDIF Business Center began its functioning at the
beginning of 1997, Marian became one of its first clients. It was not a big problem for
the qualified engineers to compile a business plan. Having obtained in August, 1997 a
lease for 3 modern industrial sewing machines, amounting to about $3,000, the family
opened a workshop by the end of the year. Today the business produces about 250 units of
women underwear per month. These are high quality products coming in 6 designs. The
business is marked by high independence because it designs, produces and distributes its
products by itself using different channels of distribution: stores, marketplaces, sales
agents, permanent customers. Notwithstanding the high quality of the products and their
compliance with the highest standards, the products are sold at comparatively modest
prices ranging from 5 to 25 UAH per unit. The products are very popular among the
customers.
Today, besides Marian and Yaroslava, the GRATIA business employs
three more people. The quality of the products meets the highest standards.
Doctors change life
sharply…
not only in United States.
Once I had a
chance to read in the magazine that one American woman, who was a doctor and worked as a
doctor for 10 years, decided to suddenly change her life and become a truck driver. So she
did as decided. Even that fact that she changes $80,000 of doctor yearly income for
$25,000 of truck driver income did not pull her up. Working 2 years as a truck driver, she
did not regret for anything and was not going to come back soon.
Something like that happened with Mark Mykolaiovych Kohan.
Graduated the Ivano-Frankivsk Medical Institute in 1986, he worked as a
doctor-anaesthetist for 10 years and never thought of starting his own business. But the
economic crises in Ukraine resulted in the decrease of financing of social sphere,
medicine included. It became more and more difficult to live up to his earning and he had
to find new sources of income. Since his wife sewed women clothes, it was the only
significant source of family income. First, they decided to sew on request, but as the
time went by, they had their own clients. Here we received our first lessons in marketing,
rules of selling, business planning. In the long run two questioned aroused: whether to
have a family business, or to establish a new company and to develop this business, or to
sew clothes only for women, or may be to change or enlarge the product line.
Started searching opportunities of the Ukrainian market, they
came to the decision that it would be very profitable to sew curtains, because of the
following reasons: 1) individual producers worked on the old-fashioned equipment; 2) the
range of raw material was very poor on the market and the prices were too high, because of
importing of small consignments of goods. That is why, they decided to sew curtains and
did not lose anything.
 They did the
renovation of the premises, hired employees and found a supplier of raw material - a
Polish company from the city of Helm. At the expense of purchasing a big consignment of
goods, the price for the raw material reduced. But here a new problem aroused -
insufficient money to buy equipment. By that time there appeared a Loan Program created by
the Business-Center. The Business-Center employees assisted with business plan
development. The Working Committee decided to grant them a loan for two years for
purchasing necessary equipment. It was a good contribution to the development of small
business in the Oblast.
At the moment 6 more people, except Mr. Mark and his wife, work
in that company. They opened their own trade-mark
store; concluded a contract on selling of goods through a number of big stores; they have
their own distributors on the market.
Of course, there are no problems with the repayment of a loan.
But Mr. Kohan is not going to stay on this point. He is working on expanding of the range
of products, seeking new suppliers and new channels of distribution. And though he did not
give up medicine (he works 7 days per week), business takes the main place in his life and
he is not going to give up his principles. |
