Upskilling women to design India’s growth story 

Prateek Bharadwaj started Skillinabox with a sale of ₹35 lakhs without even a product! Today his start-up, which offers online fashion design courses, rakes in revenues of ₹2 crore a month  

Fortune favours the brave and those with good intentions. 

When Prateek Bharadwaj completed his Mechanical Engineering degree from VIT Vellore, he followed a path familiar to many graduates: he got a job.  

“I worked with IL&FS Skills, the NSDC, and several other government initiatives at the grassroots level,” he recalls. 

This on-the-ground experience taught him a valuable lesson: for any education to be meaningful, it must empower the learner with skills that lead to financial independence. 

“Vocational skills represent a massive sector,” says Prateek.  

“While the government has been proactive with its Skilling India program, the execution hasn’t quite met the mark.” 

Recognising this gap, Prateek launched his first start-up, CSB Education & Skills.  

“We set up offline skill centres for rural youth, focusing on practical job roles like retail sales, electrician, fitter, plumber, sewing, and more. Our vision was to build a solution that could reach every household in India—and eventually, the world.” 

However, offline centres had their limitations. 

In 2019, a new idea took shape: what if a training centre could fit in a box? And so, Skillinabox was born—with a clear mission to enable learners to gain skills from the comfort of their homes, using training kits and online instruction. 

Prateek believed he had struck gold with this concept. But just as momentum was building, the COVID-19 pandemic brought everything to a halt. 

“We had to pause everything,” he says. “I went back home and sat with the idea, waiting for the right moment to bring it back to life.” 

However, the whole purpose of “Helping people” didn’t leave my mind, and with a friend, we started EMPOWERX – where we trained our house help in making masks and sold them online.”  

“In 2022, we built a small website, an Instagram page and started launching our Online Fashion Designing Program.” Selling without a product!?!  

Without a product and without a skilled person to develop it, Prateek launched his fashion design course online for a fee of ₹35,000.  

“This may appear foolishly brave, but he explains, “In America, it’s quite popular to launch an idea online and get people to pay for it like Kickstarter, Fundable, GoFundMe and so on. So, I thought that if I could not get my product ready, I would return the money.”  

Prateek raised ₹35 lakhs in the four months before he started the first batch of Skillinabox. 

Making the product 

The ₹35 lakhs were very heartening, but on the other hand, he had to get his online training program ready.  

What would he teach? “I got onto all the professional platforms; LinkedIn, Naukri, Glassdoor and began searching for fashion designers who I thought could help me.” At LinkedIn, he met Ritvik, who was a fashion designer working with a fashion house.  

“I met Ritvik and explained the idea of my company. I wanted to teach fashion designing online so that people could become financially independent.”  

The passion and the intent to help teach this skill got to Ritvik. He signed on and began work on creating a fashion design course online.   

“We first created a Learning Management System, and we would shoot, edit our programs and upload them as they got ready. 80 people took the first course, which was for four months and a hundred hours. 

Growth 

The bravery paid off. However, entrepreneurship presents new challenges at every step.  

“Many people know how to make a product but often fail at selling it.” He knew very clearly the role social media played in his business. And he ensured that he kept the company’s digital presence highly visible. “We kept posting videos and other posts on all the social media platforms. For example, Ritvik would recreate a Manish Malhotra garment and post it. Even if we got no likes, we didn’t let that stop us. We just kept at it.” 

The doggedness paid off. In 2023, they saw a massive spike in engagement on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Says Prateek, “YouTube went from 1,000 followers to 120,000 in one month in 2023. Instagram went from 2,000 to 60,000. It paid off. Today we have one million followers combined on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and it’s all organic.”  

Hiring 

“Hiring the right people is a massive challenge. I feel that the youngsters don’t want to work as much nowadays, and the hiring market is difficult.” Prateek understood from the very beginning the value of his employees. 

“It is people who are responsible for the success of a company. If they understand the goal and the path, we take to reach that goal, if you can get them to commit to it, then you can build a great team.” 

Three early employees of Skillinabox were so inspired by Prateek’s aim to help people get skilled so that they could be financially independent that they invested their own money in the company. Says Prateek, “I may have started my company with customers’ funds, but later, when we needed money to scale up, it was Ritvik Chauhan, Kanisk Sati and Kishlay who collectively invested ₹35 lakhs in Skillinabox.” They are now shareholders in the company. 

But the commitment was so deep that Ritvik took money from his parents and his savings, while Kanisk took a loan, and Kishlay borrowed from a friend.  

Says Kanisk, who manages the Operations side for this company, “I took a loan to put money in our company because I have seen how women have to be dependent on their fathers or husbands financially and all that they have to go through.” 

Future 

Prateek today employs 100 people, and while the early three have invested more than just their efforts, a few have also been offered Employee stakes.  

Says Prateek, “To build a team, I think it is important that every team should have a leader who should be at the core of the business and not leave. My leaders have shares in the company. That helps build cohesiveness.” 

But growth always demands more. And Prateek’s persistence paid off every time. When we raised a bridge fund of ₹70 lakhs, I met Akshay Chaturvedi at an event and wanted him to invest. He simply refused to respond to my correspondence. Finally, after six months, he asked me to meet him. He said that you are very persistent.

A group of Angel Investors including A Akshay Chaturvedi, Prashanth Nair, Amit Kulshreshtha, Manish Gupta, Anand and Prabal funded us with ₹70 lakhs. That money we used to get a new, bigger office, hire a new team of 15 people (now 100+) and make improvements to our course. This was in 2022. 

Between October and December 2022, there was a fall in sales. “We didn’t have money to pay salaries, but people stayed. By July 2023, we saw the business going up and reaching ₹1 crore in July 2023. Now our sales are at ₹2 crore per month.” 

“Skillinabox added cosmetology as well. This helps a person so inclined to set up their own beauty parlour. Prateek also tied up with the National Institute of Design (NID) and NSDC to further ratify their course. Says Prateek, “Our syllabus is pretty much the same as NID except that they do a more in-depth course. So, if we teach pattern making in 5 hours, they’d do it in 10.” 

They’ve also added Experiential Centres in Pune, Mumbai and Noida. “These are centres where people can come and see what they can get from us. They can even try their hand at the machine or check out different fabrics, and get a deeper idea of what fashion design courses will teach. And not only can people gift a skill to a girl in a village, but they will also get updates on how she is doing after she has learnt a skill.” 

While Prateek aims to penetrate India, he also has his sights set across the world.  

“40% of our students have started on their own or are working with other companies. It makes me so happy to see this.” And therein lies the true secret of success: to help others. Profits always follow.