I am Salma Begum and my nickname is Neha. I was born and raised in Charjhakalia village of Katiadi thana in Kishoreganj district. I completed my primary education from Charjhakalia Model High School and SSC in 2008 from Katiadi Girls High School. I moved to Dhaka to complete my higher secondary education. In 2010, I completed my HSC from Tejgaon College. In 2016, I completed my Masters in Accounting. While studying in university, I taught at Siddiqui School, Tejgaon for about 1.5 years. After completing my Honors, I worked in a private television channel for 3 years. While doing that job, I started my business in 2016 selling embroidered clothing item online. Juggling my job, family and illness affected my business.
Because of losses, I had to shut my business in 2019. Towards the end of 2019, on the advice of Razib Ahmed, Founder President of e-CAB, I decided to give one more try as an entrepreneur. This time I started selling local sweets of Chapainawabganj. Among the local sweets of Chapai Nawabganj, the Adi Chomchom is very famous. It is an 150 year old sweet.
With my new online initiative, I planned to sell local sweets of Chapainawabganj as well as other local food items in all the 64 districts. After getting good response from my customers, I added seasonal fruits like lichi. In the meantime, I have received great feedback from my customers with another product, the local cheese of Astagram, a branding product of my home district Kishoreganj.
During pandemic, I gave up my regular job and became a full-time entrepreneur with new vigor and energy. Along with food, I restarted my old passion, designer clothing, on the advice of Razib Ahmed. I work with Rajshahi Silk fabric. Although a GI product, it is not very popular because lack of necessary promotion. Many customers think that Rajshahi silk is expensive and many entrepreneurs do not want to work with it because this fabric takes a lot of time to produce and quite expensive.
I want to promote Rajshahi silk and sell silk products online. My goal is to sell Rajshahi silk products in all 64 districts as well as abroad.
In addition to being an entrepreneur, I currently work as a reporter for the online news outlet Techzoom.
One of our goals with trust is to collect information on different local products and develop quality contents on those products. At the same time, we want to do research on how to sell Bangladeshi products online and provided assistance to various public and private organizations that are working to develop Bangladeshi e-Commerce industry.
Research is very important to ensure the growth of Bangladeshi e-Commerce. Online sales of local products grew a lot in the last two years but the problem there is no market study, research, or any kind of survey to understand the potential of local products. Through research we can understand our customers and various aspects of our products-strength and weakness. Using that information, we can promote those products online and that will increase the sales of Bangladeshi products online. We need to research on product packaging, quality control, customers and various other matters.
It is possible to find out through research the use of indigenous raw materials in the production of indigenous products. There is a need for research on how our domestic products can be made entirely of indigenous materials. Research can play an important role in improving the content quality of online products. The more research is done on e-commerce of the country, the more it will grow.