How do you stay productive when you’re unemployed? Well, the current generation vent and lament unemployment issues on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. But it’s a different story for a 25-year-old Doma Tamang.
A University graduate and a budding entrepreneur, Doma is making the best of the popular social networking site Instagram while staying unemployed. She owns an account on Instagram that goes by the handle doma_crochet. And this is where she uploads all her creative products and garner customers for her crocheted products. It’s technically a marketing platform for her hand-made products which ranges from crocheted replicas of popular animated characters or animals in the form of key chains, baby toys, dream catchers to even custom-made home decor items.
Doma ventured into this while she was unemployed. She casually made a doll resembling a panda using discarded yarns, took a picture of it and posted on Instagram and things changed for good.
“A few friends suggested I make dolls and that they would place orders. So I began doing that by studying on YouTube. The first time I tried it took me a day and I made a Panda. And I posted it on Instagram and then people started placing orders. It’s been hardly two months and within this period I sold around 90 products,” said Doma Tamang, an entrepreneur in Thimphu.
She has a bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Development. She worked as a contract teacher right after graduation. But her true passion lied somewhere else. For Doma, a nine-to-five job is overrated and mundane. So she quit her teaching profession to become an online entrepreneur.
“These days it’s not easy to get a job. Because a 9-to-5 job is highly overrated it’s become status in the society. People look down on you when you don’t have a job. So you don’t have to stay up to what people expect of you to be. If you have an interest and idea there is always social networking sites as platforms. We don’t even need a proper store as such to display our ideas and skills. We live in a digital world and have digital platforms at our disposal. So it’s easy now if you have the skills and ideas,” she added.
Doma says because she runs her business online, there is no dearth of customers. She gets orders from places outside Thimphu as well. There are at least 10 people placing orders via Instagram;
“People keep placing orders almost every day on Instagram. The technique is to take pictures and keep posting on Instagram. Need to keep the Instagram page up to date. If you don’t update time and again you don’t get orders. Because I have more followers on Instagram so people tag and recommend. First I had only a handful of people who are my friends. They bought, took pictures, tagged and posted on Instagram and that’s how it worked.”
With many people placing orders, Doma’s husband Saran Tenzin Tamang says she is having hard time meeting deadlines to deliver orders. So he helps her out in all possible ways.
“When there are products to be delivered I help with that. It’s going to take a lot of her time if she handles the deliveries too. Sometimes I help out by buying yarns, she sends me samples. Her customers want her to make characters of their choice and when she has difficulty in recognising or knowing the characters, I google out and tell her what it looks like, do background research on the characters that she is not familiar with,” said Saran Tenzin Tamang, Doma’s Husband.
Just two months since she first started commercial operation and the business already looks promising. She now dreams of opening a small store in the future for her own convenience and for the convenience of her customers. Doma says opportunities and platforms are endless, and that all one need to do is know and pursue their passion while making the best of what the digital world has in store for millennials.
