Many indian grandmothers are finding themselves with limited sets of things they can do to stay busy. The opportunities available to them are limited because of their lack of prior work exposure and education; they don’t have a lot of friends; their children and grandchildren are often too busy with their own lives too.

However, they often do have one impressive skill: being able to stitch and embroider stuff by hand. Their abilities might not compare to a professional, but this is something many of them do well.

I’d love to see a business which helps them employ this skill. It would make them feel more productive about their lives and make them more financially free (so they can do their own luxury spending).

The concept might work like this:

• The business finds clients in the US, UK (and potentially other developed countries) who would like custom hand-embroidered clothing (they can design it, or choose from many pre-existing options). From what I understand, people are willing to pay upto $60-70 for such clothing. This is a good earning for anyone in the developing world.
• The business also finds grandmas who have good embroidery skills. The business relays the designs to them, the grandmas make them, and the business then helps ship the final product back to the clients.
• To a some extent, coordinating with the grandmas might involve their children since grandmas are often not so tech friendly and can’t quite handle all the shipping logistics themselves. However, children are typically more than happy to take these obligations.
• The business could take a small cut from the total sales.

The ideal executor of this idea is probably an Indian student studying in the US or the UK. The clients can be mostly other students in their college, or their families (most colleges have a lot of rich kids!). Finding the grandmas shouldn’t be that hard because all their indian friends have grandmas who probably match the description. After the first few orders, we have great word-of-mouth effect on both sides: students will get asked about where they got the clothing from; grandmas will want to brag about the earning they are making to other grandmas and rope them in.

In my opinion, this is a great win-win-win business.