A busy shopping street in Istanbul, Turkey
“When you buy from a small business, you are not helping a CEO buy a third vacation home. You are helping a little girl get dance lessons, a little boy get his team jersey, a mom put food on the table, a dad pay a mortgage, or a student pay for college.”
This is a pretty viral note on the internet about small businesses. I remember my dad forwarding this message and is definitely worth pondering.
In a beautiful article originally written for Holdfast Gear by Matthew Swaggart, he writes:
..One of the many emotions that one can feel daily is pride. No, not the ugly kind of pride that thrives on elevating the self above others, but the kind that warms your heart. The kind that you feel when you see your little boy get his first base hit. Or when you walk your little girl down the aisle. The kind that makes you feel an immense sense of gratitude for gifts, experiences, relationships that you realize you really aren’t worthy of.
Recently I’ve encountered some experiences related to my work that, as I have processed them, have caused me to feel a great sense of pride and gratitude for being among a group of individuals who are really a new breed – a group of individuals who have emerged in recent years as change agents in a new, recovering economy. I’m talking about those in small business…
If we really think about it, we can discover a lot of awe-inspiring stories around us. It’s true that many large brands have had small humble beginnings and might have gone through their struggling stages, but small businesses, in the initial states where they are filled with passion, zeal and hard work definitely resonates the above themes.
Another busy shopping street in Istanbul, Turkey
Mathew Swaggart further writes:
The landscape of today’s economy for a startup can be unfamiliar and treacherous terrain. With all of the heart and soul that is wrapped up in starting a business from the raw material of your life, researching, developing, marketing, and delivering a product becomes a highly personal endeavor
Recollecting a recent experience, few years back, I had used services from Tiny Suprise, a gifting company based in Chennai, India for sending some gifts to Netta for her birthday. Not only did the quality of the product impress me, but the entire experience from the perfect timing of the deliveries to the quality of the packaging was top notch. I have been reading about their story recently. I did have other options which are pretty big names in the Indian online gift landscape but trying a relatively new company gave a fresh experience overall. Tiny Surprise may soon cease to be a small company and may turn out to be pretty huge. The same approach even applies to smaller grocery shops near our homes serving only nearby communities and can’t afford huge online portals with their mammoth logistic empires. Definitely, these are all relative and perspectives can vary for different people, but it’s nevertheless very inspiring to see small businesses transforming struggles into catalysts for growth. The quote at the beginning of this article echoes in my mind. God bless.
A lamp shop in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.