Today we’d like to introduce you to Divvya.
Hi Divvya, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Growing up, I was a pretty rambunctious kid.
I was always getting in trouble for talking in class and not paying attention but my mom always said “Oh, she’ll be fine.“ She never said that as a way to ignore my behaviors but more so as a way to embrace who I was and let me be free to be whoever I want to be.
I became more of a wallflower in school as I got older – not really involved in any clubs or after school activities. College is really when I let myself shine. The freedom to set my own schedule and pursue the things that interested me and just structure my time the way that best suited my mental capacity was huge.
It’s funny I almost missed the application deadline for college. My parents were so involved with my sisters’ college application process but in true younger child fashion, we didn’t have much of a conversation around it my senior year. I remember being at the beginning/halfway through my senior year, me and my parents were like “Oh when am I gonna apply to college?” It wasn’t more so that they didn’t expect me to go. It was \ just that I’ve always had my mind made up about things. I think they just thought that I would figure it out or come to them one day like “I want to go to college here.”
I truly had no idea what I wanted to do.
I remember visiting UT when my sisters were getting ready to go to college and I didn’t really vibe with it and I didn’t get to explore much of the city either enough for me to feel like that would be my home, which is funny looking back because Austin is such a big part of who I am now. I just remember not knowing what I wanted to do and I thought well let me just apply UH and I can figure it out from there so I applied to join the business program and I actually ended up getting an academic scholarship. So I was like “Great, I can you finish up beginner credits and use the time to figure out what discipline it is that I want to pursue.”
After my first year, UH was really starting to warm up to me and it was nice that my sisters were seniors in college when I was a freshman so I had some familiar faces to guide me. At that time, I felt like I really wanted to be in New York City to pursue Fashion, so my mom and I flew out to New York and toured fashion schools.
I had my heart set on FIT but my involvement in college organizations was also growing, and I started to see all of the really cool opportunities that business students had at UH. UH has the No 1 Sales & No 1 Entrepreneurship Program in the country. I saw that these kids got to build real things in college as opposed to just going to class and completing a paper, and that started to energize me and it made me realize that I actually would love to see myself build something. I would love to be a CEO.
I went ahead and submitted my application to FIT… and then never heard back. I kept reaching out to the admissions office and one day I got an email that said “Hey, It looks like we mis-filed your paperwork, so your application was never taken into consideration in the first place.” I really really believe that it was serendipity or the universe guiding me because I absolutely love Bauer & UH. That university was my launching pad into embracing every part of who I am, and it really harnessed my ambition. Specifically the Steven Stagner Sales Excellence Institute. The undergraduate sales program absolutely changed my life, coming from a place of being loud and unapologetic to becoming a wallflower because fitting in is hard, to being put into a pressure cooker type environment where you have professors taking the time to push you and show you that “Hey you’re actually really bright and if you just step out of your own way, the sky is a limit.”
I landed my first job in Austin with Dell selling data center infrastructure. I met incredible people and I really got to prove to myself that I’m good at sales and at building relationships. I also met one of my best friends there and it brought me to Austin, which is the start of this entire journey. After about 1.5 years, there was a voice inside of me telling me that I really wasn’t destined to be in tech sales. It kept reminding me that what I really wanted from life was to make a difference. Now mind you, I was still pretty young and naïve, and I thought that pursuing that kind of dream would be easy, so instead of taking a promotion that was potentially available to me at the time, I left DELL with no next steps. I told myself the longer I stayed in a career that I didn’t want, the harder it would be for me to pivot as I got older. So I left and very quickly learned that it was gonna be a much rougher journey than I expected. I will say I had the best summer of my life after leaving that job in the spring but after four months of the best summer of my life, I knew that I needed to get my life together. I ended up finding a job at a startup, so I basically went from one of the largest companies in the world to a company that nobody had ever heard of. That was also a very impactful experience because it taught me a lot about the startup world, how startups raise money, and it also showed me an idea can be but can still fail if there’s no leadership present. The startup actually went belly-up eight months after I joined and I knew that whatever my next step was, it had to be something that I could stick with for at least 2 1/2 to 3 years. Enough dilly-dallying, it had to be something that provided stability so that I could pursue my dream on the side while working my 9 to 5. This also happened in the spring (universe had a pattern of spring cleaning my life), and at the end of summer, I got connected with a referral at Indeed where I started my next role. I was in Indeed for about 18 months when I started to hear that voice again asking me “Is this really what you want? Do you see yourself being here in the next five years? And if the answer is no you have to think about what is next. You have to start thinking backwards.”
At the time, I was also going through a huge social shift. My friend groups were shifting, dating sucked, and I needed to pour my energy into something that lit me up – that didn’t have any strings or expectations attached to it, didn’t have any expectations attached to it. And that’s how Rasm was born.
I actually had the idea in 2023 but never pulled the trigger. When we first launched, the product was so well received. Every single one of my customers came back and said that it was a product that they agreed was worth trying and having again and again. Over a year later, we are now in six local doors.
The small-business community that I’ve found in Austin is so incredible, supportive, always willing to give advice when you want it, and always willing to provide you additional opportunities if you’re seeking them. And I’ve made some incredible friends.
Looking back, I always wanted to build something. I always wanted to do something impactful or just make a difference. Not in a way that I would be remembered for it but more so in a way of I’m glad that the time that I spent on this planet was spent doing something that improved lives.
I grew up watching my parents build their business from the ground up, and all of their friends own their own businesses as well, which is pretty uncommon for the south Asian archetype so in a way it was a rarity that I was surrounded by entrepreneurs. I definitely get that spirit from my parents, from the community that I was brought up in, and also just the nature of who I am as a person.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely has not been the smoothest road, isn’t that the case whenever you’re starting a company? There’s trial and error and lessons learned.
I think the largest struggle per se, has been many sleepless nights and reducing costs.
From a production perspective, I am the sole founder and operator of the company, so since day one I’ve been making all of the products by hand, by myself, and doing all of the marketing efforts.
We started out at the farmers market and have now scaled to six local doors in Austin. We’re also on the brink of further expansion, but I’m making every single jar. And we’re self-funded so I haven’t really found a lot of room in the budget up until this point to train somebody to make the ghee. Recently, we’ve found some really great help here and there helping us do deliveries or run markets when I can’t make it in. So next on the horizon is definitely being able to train someone for the long run.
Reducing costs has been a bit of a science experiment. Anyone in the food industry that I’ve connected with who uses glass jars for their company can quite literally relate to the fact that you know these things are expensive, but I refuse to move to plastic. I think it’s tough, in this world you need fuel and/or carbon emission in order to produce nearly anything these days but at least glass is reusable so that’s something that relieves me.
Also finding high-quality butter at an appropriate wholesale price has been a journey. For most of the company’s existence, we were buying high quality butter at a retail price because I just refused to compromise. It absolutely ate into the profit margins and I was OK with that. I just let it go because that wasn’t why I started the company. I started the company because I wanted to put something on peoples tables that felt good, tasted good, and allowed me to showcase where I come from. I never gave up searching though, and just recently we started getting butter at a wholesale price from a Texas dairy farm, which has definitely benefited our product, our customers, and the business so I’m very excited about that!!!!
I just have to make my peace with things coming at their own pace because I do have a 9 to 5 as well and again as a solo founder who still has a small business budget, I gotta keep on going.
As you know, we’re big fans of Rasm. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Rasm in Hindi means ritual or custom. I think the one thing that I really want people to know about our brand is that it truly is an ode to my heritage and how much my cooking has been a pillar of where I come from.
When you are really in the thick of running your own business and you’re wearing multiple hats, sometimes you don’t think about that ethos every single day, but it really is special that a recipe that was given to me by my mother, which is also a product that traces back to my ancestors thousand of years is finding ago, is finding itself in people’s kitchens and becoming a part of what I believe to be one of the most sacred moments of every human’s day, which is eating.
I want people to know that I created this company to be able to serve them something that is authentic, has clean ingredients, tastes good, comes from a company with sustainable and ethical practices.
What sets us apart? Honestly, this verbatim is coming from my customers that the ghee they bought from a big-box store has a commercial, plastic-y smell and taste – not as clean, not as rich, and a little greasy. Whereas the ghee they get from me smells like a croissant. It’s rich, creamy, and tastes clean and they don’t feel sick after eating their meal like they would if they used butter. According to my customers, it sounds like my quality sets me apart and I’m very proud of that.
I might’ve mentioned this earlier, but one piece of feedback that I consistently receive from customers or a new customers I should say, at the farmers market, is when I tell them my price they always say “Oh that’s way better than what I was expecting!”, which means of the people who don’t use ghee, a portion of those people have heard of ghee and they know what it is, but there’s a reason why they haven’t made that purchase and I would argue a portion of the reason why they haven’t made that purchase comes down to price.
If you think about the quantity that ghee is typically sold in, there’s not a lot of bulk vendors out there. We do bulk jars of 32 oz for $35, and we’ve started selling regularly at the market now. We will fill any size jar that you want, so I tell customers that if you bring me a jar, I will fill it up and price it accordingly.
All that to say, our base option is 12 oz for $12.99.
I want to prove to myself and anybody else watching me grow this company or anybody inspired to start their own business that we don’t have to put profit above everything else. I would rather profit at an equal priority level with everything else.
Like look at our Instagram handle. Initially, Rasm just by itself was not available when I was making the account, but the more we grew and the more I looked at that Instagram handle, the more I wanted to keep it because that is what I want to build. I want to build a community and you can’t do that if you don’t put people first. It’s almost like people want a village, but they don’t want to be a villager. Well this is me being a villager.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I don’t see a lot of future shifts with the ‘cooking fats industry,’ if that’s even what you’d call it, but I think ghee falls in the category of avocado oil, olive oil, oil, beef tallow, coconut oil, and butter. I don’t really see a lot of shifts as opposed to trends. I think there’s a couple more ghee companies that I’ve seen come out over the last five years, which is interesting. I think differentiation might be huge or explaining to your customers why your product might be better but that’s basic product marketing. I have some ideas that I’m not necessarily gonna share here but I think creative ways to keep your product on the table is something that I think is gonna be key. I also think visibility is gonna continue to be huge too. I think a lot of ghee isn’t as affordable to people which is a big pillar of our company. I don’t think people should pay a premium for food that’s good for them and I think that’s what is broken about the food system in this country. I think there’s a lot of room to play around with the go to market strategy, whether that’s pricing or unique ways to land up on somebody’s table even for people that are already eating ghee. I’m also really big on collaborations with local businesses. I’ve done a ton of collaborations with local bakers as a way to get the product in the hands of people in a way that they would’ve never thought about.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rasmcommunity.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rasm.community/
