Interviewed By Bonnishikha Chowdhury, MBR Team

Romoni, Reaching Out to The Households of All The Romonis Out There

MBR: How did the idea of Romoni come into being? What motivated you to start Romoni?

Armin Zaman Khan: I started my career in Standard Chartered Bank in 2013. After two years of service at SCB, I joined a2i as a consultant. From the days of a2i, I started implementing a rural e-commerce project named “Ekshop” and thus I gained a lot of interest in this sector. Finally, I took a brave decision to give up the regular job and start my own company.

Romoni started as a simple motivation fueled by a problem that I had faced myself. I wanted to get a simple haircut from a renowned stylist, but after calling her salon for one week straight, I couldn’t get the appointment. That prompted me to think: there must be a better solution to this problem!

I started talking to a few beauticians in the parlors in my neighborhood about their salaries, earnings, etc., and came to realize that a lot of them provide home services to their regular clients after hours to earn extra income.

I found out that they earned around 2000-3000 taka per job with their home service clients, an amount that can aggregate to a much higher monthly income compared to the salary they were earning from their employers every month. The two instances prompted me to start thinking about the beauty industry as a whole and I realized that a large part of it is still broken. Since I was (and still am) quite passionate about solving problems through technological innovation, I sought after designing a tech product that can address this problem.

MBR: How was the response of the service providers in the initial stage? And what changes do you observe now?

Armin Zaman Khan: The primary response of our service providers was satisfactory. Day by day, the registered number of service providers was increasing. 85% of our service providers started earning more than their previous job. We also provided them with quality skill training, so that, they can perform better in their work. I have observed massive integrity and engagement of the service providers during the pandemic more than at any other time. 

MBR: Could you please give us an overview of Romoni in terms of services you offer, the number of clients you have and the size of your business, etc.?

Armin Zaman Khan: Currently, we are offering beauty services on-demand, which include salon, makeup, spa, and bridal services. We have also launched our own brand of salon beauty products under our brand name “Romoni Salon Naturals” last year. We want to create a 360-degree business incubation platform for women micro-entrepreneurs that will guide and support them in their journey to be full-fledged entrepreneurs from freelancers, with training, authentic products, growth capital, etc. We serve up to 120 customers in a day, though it may vary depending on the order volume. So far, we have generated $400,000 worth of business on our platform.

MBR: What barriers does Romoni encounter in general? What measures did Romoni take in response to such challenges?

Armin Zaman Khan: The service providers and the customers are the souls of Romoni. But unfortunately, we don’t have the same type of SP in terms of working standards. The root of this problem is the different background of every SP. Primarily, we only have freelance service providers who worked for multiple organizations, which created a lot of variety in working nature. This created a lot of complaints from customers about the variety and difference of the services they were receiving. To mitigate this problem, we started hiring full-time beauticians on our platform. We provided the same skill training and products to all of them, to ensure that the working standard and provided services are almost the same for every customer. 

MBR: How has the pandemic affected your business?

Armin Zaman Khan: Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, a general lockdown was introduced throughout the country. To comply with the government regulations and to maintain the health and safety measures during the pandemic, we had to minimize our business operations. It severely truncated the income of our service providers. To mitigate that impact, we partnered up with 2 NGOs to give humanitarian support to our most vulnerable service providers.

MBR: The beauty industry is booming, what are your strategic priorities? How will you scale–up your business?

Armin Zaman Khan: Our primary goal is to be a reliable platform for all things beauty, lifestyle, and more for the urban and semi-urban women
in Bangladesh. Our secondary goal is to create a 360-degree enabling platform for women micro-entrepreneurs in the creative industries and provide
them with all kinds of support: financial and non-financial, for establishing and growing their businesses. Alongside, we want to grow our existing service and product businesses.