Meet Sushant Gaur, Atulya Bhatia and Ashish Agarwal co-founders of Adeera Packaging
Adeera Packaging is one of the largest paper bags and pouches manufacturers and suppliers in India. Founded by Sushant Gaur in 2012 as Urja Packaging, the company was rebranded and registered as Adeera Packaging in 2019 after partnering with its biggest client Atulya Bhatia from Cartonwala.
Today, including Sushant Gaur, it has three co-founders – Atulya Bhatia and Ashish Agarwal (both directors of Adeera Packaging).
Tell us a little about yourself
Sushant Gaur: I’ve done my MBA from Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, Delhi, after studying Mass Communication in my graduation.
I started Urja Packaging, a pre-curser to Adeera right after completing my education. My Father used to run a chain of service dealerships for Tata cars & commercial vehicles
Atulya Bhatia: I was very enterprising from an early age, I started working in Wipro while completing my education from Pune University.
Post that I have worked in the education sector doing marketing for almost 2 years. The entrepreneurship bug bit me and left my job to start multiple businesses in box manufacturing, auto parts import-export, customized merchandising etc.
In 2019 I left all other business to dedicate all my time to Adeera Packaging. My mother worked in the banking sector.
Ashish Agarwal: I have done B. Tech in Computer Science & went on to do my MBA(IB) from IIFT Delhi (2012 batch).
I then worked for 9 years with fortune 100 companies and my last experience was working with the largest packaging company in India – Uflex. I joined Adeera as a co-founder in 2020 and I currently am heading all sales and business development activities for Adeera Packaging.
On the personal front, I am happily married and have been living in Noida since 1994. My hobbies are reading management books and also enjoy watching cricket and latest bollywood movies.
Kindly brief the role of Sushant, Atulya and Ashish at Adeera Packaging and what’s the motive behind Adeera?
Atulya handles all operations, logistics, quality and HR, Ashish handles sales, business development and compliances, I, Sushant head future growth planning, strategy, finance and everything that’s left.
Our purpose is to make a sustainable world built on circular economies by making environment-friendly products feasible and available to the world
How is Adeera packaging a One Stop Shop for customized Paper Bags in India?
Ashish Agarwal: Adeera Packaging constantly focuses on providing great quality and service to its customers.
We have continuously invested in building our capabilities. In this endeavor, we have ensured that all our production lines have an in line 2-colro printing capability.
This along with a 4 color flexo machine gives us the capability of delivering on the most complex customised solution to our customers at scale.
Tell us about Sushant , Ashish and Atulya’s past journey,and from where you guys started and how long will be your journey.
Sushant Gaur: The vision is to create an organization that allows environment-friendly packaging to become truly sustainable, cheap and readily available.
Our journey to achieve this vision will take us to creating a global ecosystem of sustainable products where we intend to work within the confines of circular economies to provide sustainable solutions for packaging
Kindly brief us about Adeera Packaging, its specialization, and the services that you offer?
Atulya Bhatia: Adeera Packaging was formed as a manufacturing company, but over the years we have realised that our value lies in the service that we provide our buyers. We deliver our product to over 30,000 pincodes in India.
We provide daily deliveries, fast turnaround times of 5-25 days and we also provide solutions through customization of bags to our customers.
This is how we have been able to create relationships with our clients as the go-to company for their packaging needs in our area of expertise.
Where do you envision Adeera to be in the long run, and what are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in the packaging industry?
Sushant Gaur: We are starting operations in the US this year and we hope to be present in more countries soon.
The Paper Bag industry is in a very exciting growth phase driven by the ban on single use plastic being applied across the world.
We see Adeera Packaging as becoming the most connected company across the world to make use of cost arbitrage and democratize the availability of recycled/agro waste based paper bags
How Sushant Ashish and Atulya started the paper bag business and what are the challenges faced?
Ashish Agarwal : As a set of individuals all of us are passionate about the environment and want to leave a better planet for the next generation.
In this endeavor, we found our calling in our mission to replace plastic bags with paper. With the foundations of Urja, Sushant understood the nuances of paper bag manufacturing.
Atulya, having been a serial entrepreneur, brought in the necessary hustle to the company. & I with my corporate experience brought in the necessary focus on team building, processes and governance.
As the company has evolved so have the challenges, in the initial phase, with the paper bag industry being highly unorganized, sensitizing the customer to quality and standards was the first wall that we scaled.
Now as the business has grown & evolved, getting the right talent that fits these needs is a challenge we are solving for currently.
What is the Leadership Mantra of Adeera Packaging?
Sushant Gaur: We micromanage till we trust and then encourage, enable, and enhance our leaders.
What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?
Atulya Bhatia: We could not predict our fast-paced growth when we started Adeera Packaging so instead of being in 1 large 70,000 sqft factory we are in 6 different locations in Delhi NCR, hence increasing our overhead costs. We haven’t learnt anything from this as we continue to make this mistake.
If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be? Your success tips for young and aspiring entrepreneurs?
Ashish Agarwal:
- Find your calling: Entrepreneurship is a long journey, your passion and your calling will drive you.
- Take Action- Avoid the analysis paralysis loop. As they say no risk no return
- Focus on working with the right set of people, ideally partner with people having similar values
Always Believe in Yourself: Keeping faith and believing in your abilities is key to executing big challenges that you will face in your journey.
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