Martha Stewart says,
“I think baking cookies is equal to Queen Victoria running an empire. There’s no difference in how seriously you take the job, how seriously you approach your whole life.”
In our today’s #FridayFeature segment on #WonderWomen, we’re proud to present a woman who bakes delicious cookies and has made a successful business out of it. Meet, Arushi Sachdeva, founder of an online handcrafted cookie company called Dohful. What made her quit her day job and start such a unique business? Let’s find out in her own words.
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“I started my career as a Professor in an Engineering college in Mumbai. I always wanted to start something of my own but lacked the right environment & team. To meet the right-minded and right kind of people, I joined the MBA program at IMT Ghaziabad. That was my first step towards entrepreneurship. During the summer internship period – I started my first business – Sandwedges, a sandwich & burger chain near our college. It scaled up to 6 outlets till 2017 end. So, you see, the businesswoman bug had already bitten me long back.
However, the Dohful story starts when I was on my honeymoon in Europe with my husband (who is also the co-founder of Dohful), Chaman. We used to love the cookies we had there for breakfast and eagerly looked forward to the time when we could have those soft baked cookies again. But once we were back to India, we never found such cookies again. We tried finding that similar taste here, but all the cookies we found were just biscuits. That’s when we decided to make our own cookies. We read, studied, and talked to a few chefs/bloggers from around the world – asking everyone what were the key aspects of making a cookie and what we should focus on. But, boy! Let me tell you it was no easy task! It took us all of 70 days and 300+ trials to come up with the perfect cookie; the one we loved and the one we knew the whole of India would love too! Once we had the formula cracked and had other things in place, Dohful was launched in November 2018.
The struggles range from one to many and varied when it comes to baking. In India, baking isn’t considered an indigenous art, and no one really goes into the details.
But cookies, especially the soft baked ones require a certain environment to be made properly; things like the temperature, the humidity and almost everything, which is most of the times not under your control, affects the cookies. So, it took us a lot of time to do the right R&D for our Dohful products and get it all right.
There was no turning point as such, besides our foodie selves craving for those European cookies. It was with the inception of this craving itself, that we knew what we wanted to build, or rather bake. From then on, it was just a matter of tweaking things here and there, to get the right taste and texture.
We both draw motivation from the fact that Dohful is a passion project for us, with which we want to make a dent in the universe for us, especially in India. It is in our motherland that we aim to change the way cookies are perceived. The fact that most people here don’t know the difference between a cookie and a biscuit, makes us more determined towards our strive to show the entire country what a genuine, real cookie is.
For now, through Dohful we’re only focusing on cookies. As for the future, we’re open to explore and brainstorm over more products which we feel would be loved by everyone, but that’s in the far future.
The Dohful journey is just getting started but the learnings from it have been many already; and through it all, the most important lesson has been that we would be able to achieve what we truly think we’d be able to achieve not just by keeping one’s hopes high but also by making one’s preparation on the same, top class.
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You can follow Arushi’s Dohful journey and her delicious cookies by following her on the social media handles below:
Go ahead, have a cookie.
