Female Foundership

Being a female founder involves fighting for your brand to be taken seriously, while also carrying the invisible weight of “being there” for everyone else.

It's showing up for your dreams while still being present for the people who count on you. And through it all — it's the belief that your story, your voice, and your vision matter.

We have many to-do lists that never seem to have an end to them. You cross one thing off and other two things pop up, and with all that in the back of our minds, we showed up not just for our business, but for our families just the same.

The Sacrifices No One Sees 💔

The smallest, most unseen things we gave up for Kosha were the ones that slowly added up.

Since both of us were working our day jobs when we started out, we barely had 3–4 hours at night to focus on the brand. So weekends? They became our full-time workdays. Saturdays and Sundays stopped being about brunches, family time, or catching up with friends. Every free minute went into building Kosha — planning, packing, brainstorming, figuring things out.

We stopped going out for dinners. Stopped shopping for ourselves. No new bags, no splurging on outfits or shoes. Every rupee was measured because every rupee counted.

And yes — we’ll be honest — there were times it felt like we were losing a part of ourselves. When things got overwhelming, it felt like life had boiled down to just work and deadlines.

That’s the part no one tells you about when you start a business. It’s not always the big sacrifices that hurt — sometimes, it’s the quiet, constant ones that you don’t even notice until much later.

Growth, Grit & Gratitude 🌱

We grew as founders, but also as people. This journey changed us — and we’re grateful for every chaotic, exhausting, beautiful part of it.

We did feel alone in the journey initially, as we felt that no one in our vicinity really understood what we were really going through. But we had each other to rely on and that kept us going forward. On days when one of us was spiraling, the other would steady the ship.

We carved out one day just for us — no business talk, just unwinding like the old days, recharging as friends before co-founders.

When Life and Business Collide 💍👜

I, Kopal, one of the co-founders, was getting married around the time we started Kosha. The doubts were very real — and deeply personal. It was supposed to be one of the most important phases of my personal life. I felt this constant pull in both directions.

My family was handling so much — things I should’ve been more involved in — and I carried a constant sense of guilt for not being fully present. But the truth is, Kosha needed me. We were bootstrapped, building from scratch, and everything was on the line. I didn’t have the luxury to press pause.

Some days, I genuinely felt like I was failing on both fronts.

It wasn't easy. But it was necessary. And I wouldn’t change it — not because it wasn’t painful, but because it taught me what it really means to show up for a dream when everything else around you is moving, too.

Still Moving — Still Showing Up ✈️

Still to this day, we are catching one flight to an exhibition and coming back home to our families by night. And while we’ve been blessed with incredibly supportive families — without whom none of this would’ve been possible — we never wanted Kosha to ever be mistaken as just a hobby or a side hustle.

This was our bread and butter. The thing we poured our time, energy, and savings into — with everything on the line.

There was always something to prove — not just to the world, but to ourselves.

The Part No One Sees 😴📦

No one really talks about that side of building something — the silent sacrifices, the sleepless nights, the mundane yet essential grind. Like that one night before an exhibition we booked pretty last minute, when we stayed up manually packing, tagging, handling SKU codes, all manual processes — with Excel sheets open and eyes half shut. That’s the part no one sees.

We still don’t have it all figured out.
But we’ve learned how to hold space for both — the chaos and the clarity, the ambition and the everyday.

And maybe that’s what it truly means to build something real.

To All the Women Holding It All Together 💌
You don’t have to choose between ambition and responsibility.
You don’t need it to be perfect, you just need to keep going.