My biggest mistake: Anaita Sarkar, founder of Hero Packaging

What happens when you get so excited over an idea for a new product that you forget to do your due diligence? 

For Hero Packaging founder Anaita Sarkar and her team, it led to the loss of a lot of time, motivation, and $55,000. 

The mistake

Two years ago, Hero Packaging wanted to launch a new product — and while Sarkar can’t yet disclose what that product was, she does say it’s one that required partnering with a new manufacturer.

At the time, this manufacturer happened to be overseas.

The Hero Packaging team believed they had “truly vetted the company” and, upon meeting with the staff over a video call, felt they “seemed so trustworthy”, explains Sarkar.

“So when we met with them on Zoom to talk about the product, instead of just getting them to send us samples and doing the whole procedure, we just placed the whole order,” Sarkar says.

“We were over-excited.”

Hero Packaging paid the deposit — roughly $35,000 — and the manufacturer told Sarkar it had new product designs and had everything “ready to go”.

But when nothing arrived, even six months later, Sarkar realised something was wrong.

The context

It was the end of 2020, a year in which Hero Packaging experienced phenomenal growth as more and more consumers shopped online.

Sarkar and her team had been doing a lot of research, and decided to keep momentum going — with a new product.

“As soon as we met [the manufacturer] we thought ‘yep, let’s just do it, we don’t want to delay bringing it out — we want to be the first ones in the market with this kind of product’.”

“And then it just went downhill.”

After the deposit was made, the manufacturer kept telling Hero Packaging, “‘it’s coming, it’s coming’, but it never did,” Sarkar explains.

“It took us months to realise there was something wrong,” she said.

The manufacturer also told Hero Packaging it was busy doing “lots of stuff with hotels because of COVID-19, and helping them out with products”.

So Sarkar gave the manufacturer the benefit of the doubt — thinking it was simply delayed and affected with supply and staffing issues, like many businesses. Hero Packaging itself was so busy dealing with its own growth, coupled with the pandemic, that these delays seemed inevitable.

“But I think it got to the six-month period when we thought, okay, they haven’t sent us anything. There’s no email communication … We tried calling a Whatsapp number, and our numbers had been blocked,” Sarkar says.

“And that’s when we started to really pursue it.”

The impact

To do so, Sarkar contacted the police in Malaysia, as well as getting lawyers involved. But this wasn’t a cheap task, especially since there’s “only so much they can do”.

“They can knock on the door, they can send some emails, they can make the phone calls. But we had to keep paying them if we wanted them to keep pursuing it,” Sarkar says.

“But then I just realised it was time to cut our losses.”

“We had lost about $55,000 in the deposit and the legal fees — with no product or anything like that,” Sarkar says.

“And I think it actually also really affected our motivation to test out new products to test new manufacturers.

“We just didn’t know how to proceed.”

The fix

Unfortunately, the money and time that was lost from the mistake can’t be recovered. But the motivation to grow — and launch the new product — has.

With 2021 being another mammoth year of growth, Sarkar says Hero Packaging wasn’t in the position to restart the process — especially since the second time around, they wanted to do it right.

Now, in 2022, Hero Packaging has the time, resources and knowledge to pick it up. The team are talking to multiple different manufacturers, getting a bunch of different samples, and starting the process again, Sarkar explains.

“We definitely want to bring it out. We just need to be very careful.”

The lesson

The lesson here is quite simple, Sarkar says: do your due diligence.

“I think you get a little complacent as you grow,” Sarkar said. “But it’s the nitty gritty that’s really important.”

“No matter how big you get, you need to go back to basics of doing all the stuff you did when you started — talking to suppliers properly; getting the samples; getting multiple iterations of samples; checking their professionalism; talking to their previous clients; and doing all the stuff that you know is really hard to do as you grow.

“But if you don’t do that, there’s just a huge potential for loss.”