Name: Zilingo’s Ankiti Bose: Building a successful startup as a woman in India
Uploaded: 2020-03-13
Duration: 3 min 45 s
Description: Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

The minute you think about fashion, but you go beyond just the consumer side of fashion or the design side of fashion, we're talking about supply chain and operations and financing of it. It tends to be very gendered industry against women. My name is unki Peebles, I'm the co founder and CEO of z lingo. You know how fashion is such a huge industry. everybody wears clothes. It's 5 % of global GDP $ 3. 8 trillion. If you include all the fabrics and trims and everything that goes into clubs, Yet it's somehow the most undigitized industry in the world. That's exploitative everything that they say that's bad about fashion is true by the way. So are we filling up landfills? Are we consuming too much? Is it all not sustainable and responsibly made? It's all true 70 % of the landfills in the world are filled up with fast fashion. And you add to all of this that there's no visibility, no sense of whether the products we think our sustainable are truly sustainable. It's basically a very large, very confused, highly undigitized, completely non transparent industry. So that's where the lingo comes in. We put in technology across the entire supply chain, right from the farmer to the mills, to the fabric makers, to the factories to the brands, so they can transparently transact with one another and then we provide technology tools for them to make their business better. It's incredibly hard to be a woman in tech in developing countries. There have been situations where I have stepped out of meetings with traders or large associations and led by a co founder or CEO or somebody else. Have the conversation Because they were a [ UNKNOWN ] and we needed to get the deal done. I think the first thing that's super important is to be undeniably good at your work on every technicality at everything so that people don't point a finger at it and say she's a woman and hence she doesn't get this. I know it's very it's very unfair because a man might be given more chances. The other thing is that I think it's totally okay to have male allies and male mentors and friends who help you in your path and career and in your journey because Sometimes that's the only help you can have. So you should raise your hand and ask for opportunities, ask for mentorship, ask for help, sees it, and really make the most of it. I think it's unusual or at least it's not Happened a lot before where an Asian company has aspired to solve a global problem at this scale as a new age startup led by a woman that's trying to do this. It's a little unusual. There are a lot of challenges that come along the way, making sure that there is trust in the brand that people don't think of this as an Asian company. Only that there is a there is a global problem to solve. There is high quality in the in the kind of products we deliver. There is a lot of trust to be built in the system. I think some of those are challenges but also that's the opportunity taking this big polluting industry digitizing it making it fair and transparent. We we hope to leave the world A lot better than we found it. And we can see that impact every single day when we work with merchants. When I'm at a conference like this, and I meet women and they come in and say, this is an inspirational story, all I think to myself is this is a huge responsibility and I cannot let them down. It scares me a little bit, the amount of responsibility that comes along with being one of the first Women to do something like this, but it's also a huge honor and I hope I don't let anyone down. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Fortune introduces the newest season of Trailblazers.

Zilingo’s Ankiti Bose: Building a successful startup as a woman in India

She faces obstacles as a woman business leader there.