Women Entrepreneurship & Network Marketing — Mohini Poojary on Ek Soch

Twenty-Two Years of Corporate Life, One Flyer

Mohini Poojary spent twenty-two years in a corporate job — a stable career, a predictable path, the kind of professional life that most people settle into permanently. The COVID lockdown disrupted that settlement.

A flyer about sanitary napkins landed at her door, and something about it stopped her. The product itself was not new. The issue was not new. But the fact that it arrived at her door as a business opportunity — and the realisation that this was a product that Indian society treated as invisible and unspeakable — crystallised something that had been building beneath the surface: a desire to do work that mattered beyond what a corporate role could offer.

She did not have a business plan. She did not have capital. She did not have industry experience. What she had was the conviction that a conversation that society refused to have needed to happen, and that the person asking the question was her.

A Mother's Bangles and a Partner's Market Knowledge

The first obstacle was capital. Mohini had no savings earmarked for entrepreneurship, no access to investor networks, no collateral except what her family was willing to risk for her belief in the idea.

Her mother pledged her two gold bangles — a gesture that carried weight far beyond the ₹50,000 they generated. It was an act of belief in a daughter's vision at a moment when the daughter herself was uncertain whether the vision was sound. That ₹50,000 became the seed capital for Stay Fine.

The second necessity was a business partner whose knowledge complemented her own. She found it in Suraj Kumar Kumbhar, who carried fifteen to sixteen years of market experience from the direct selling space. While Mohini brought administrative knowledge and HR background, Suraj brought the street-level understanding of how products moved through networks. The partnership was built on complementarity rather than similarity — each brought what the other lacked.

Five Women and the Power of Grassroots Movement

Stay Fine began not with a sales team or marketing budget. It began with five women who believed in the product enough to stake their own reputation on recommending it.

From those five women, the network grew to five hundred within a year, then to five thousand, then to thirty thousand across Maharashtra in three years. The women who joined were not primarily motivated by corporate compensation structures. They were motivated by the product's value, the income opportunity, and the sense of being part of something that was addressing a stigma that had shaped their own lives.

Many of those thirty thousand women became lakhpatis — earning income in the lakhs annually — through a combination of product sales and building their own networks beneath them. This was not happening in glittering office spaces or through sophisticated marketing campaigns. It was happening in the homes, slums, and villages of Maharashtra, woman to woman, conversation by conversation.

Sitting on the Ground in Slums, Breaking a Taboo

Mohini's early sales strategy was born not from choice but from necessity. She had no budget for renting halls for product demonstrations in formal venues. She had the product, her conviction, and the willingness to sit on the ground in slums across Satara, Kolhapur, and other smaller towns in Maharashtra, demonstrating sanitary napkins to women and girls who had never heard a woman speak openly about them.

The conversation itself was the barrier. In lower-middle-class and village communities, menstruation remained a topic so culturally suppressed that even mothers and daughters did not discuss it openly. Mohini's willingness to sit in the dirt and speak about it — to answer questions without embarrassment, to normalise the conversation through her own ease with it — was itself a product offering that went beyond the sanitary napkin itself.

That cultural work, done person by person, community by community, was what actually built the business. The product was good. The network effect was powerful. But the permission to speak — the normalisation that Mohini was offering through her own willingness to be vulnerable and direct — was what opened the door.

The Husband in the Demo Room

One of Mohini's most strategically important observations concerns who should be present during product demonstrations.

Women, she observed, are often reluctant to spend money on themselves — even when the product directly benefits their own health and comfort. They prioritise family spending, defer their own needs, and treat personal purchases as discretionary rather than necessary. But husbands, when included in the demonstration and given the information, readily spend on products for their wives and daughters.

The insight shaped every demo she conducted. Always include the husband. The conversation shifts from a woman justifying a purchase she feels slightly guilty about to a family investment in the health of the women they care for. The same product, the same value proposition, framed differently because a different decision-maker was in the room.

The Network Model and Why It Works

Mohini's approach to network marketing is built on a specific understanding of how it actually functions in human life.

Every person, she argues, operates within networks — with family, with colleagues, with neighbors, with friends. Every person is constantly recommending things within those networks: clothes, jewellery, services, advice. These recommendations are generating trust and traffic for other businesses, and the person making the recommendations is earning nothing.

Stay Fine converts that natural behaviour into income. A woman who recommends products to her network is not doing something artificial. She is doing what she has always done — but now being compensated for the value she is generating through those recommendations.

The business model itself is structured to support this: a one-time lifetime registration fee that is lower than the value of free products a member receives, followed by access to all future products at thirty to fifty percent discount, with income generation through referrals. It is not designed to pressure people into recruitment. It is designed to make referral natural and rewarding when it happens.

When Women Earn from What They Already Do

Mohini makes a specific observation about women's relationship with wealth generation and marketing.

Women are naturally gifted at word-of-mouth marketing — they recommend extensively, build relationships through recommendation, and create traffic for products and services through their own social networks. Yet they earn nothing from this, while formal marketers earn commission on the exact same behaviour. Stay Fine is built on the premise that if women are already doing the marketing, they should also be receiving the income.

The thirty thousand women in the Stay Fine network are not doing something unnatural. They are monetising something they have always done — and the income structure allows them to do it while also maintaining their relationships and their integrity, because the recommendation is grounded in genuine belief in the product rather than in pressure to sell.

The Pivot to Beauty Products — Following the Money

Mohini made an observation that revealed an inconsistency in how the women in her network valued themselves and their needs.

Women in lower-middle-class communities would spend significantly on beauty products — creams, serums, makeup — yet resist spending on sanitary napkins. The inconsistency pointed to a deeper issue: women had been culturally positioned to care about appearing beautiful for others, but had been trained to see their own bodily needs as shameful rather than worthy of investment.

Rather than judge this reality, Mohini created a product category that bridged it. Stay Fine launched a line of chemical-free, paraben-free beauty products — premium quality, genuinely beneficial, positioned not as vanity but as self-care. The category took off in ways that sanitary napkins had not, eventually generating ₹10 to ₹15 lakh per month in sales.

This was not a retreat from the original mission. It was recognition that the path to addressing taboo lies sometimes through creating entry points in categories where women are already willing to spend.

The Hardest Thing: Managing Home and Business

When asked what the biggest challenge has been, Mohini does not point to capital, competition, or product development. She points to time.

Managing a growing business while maintaining presence as a mother and daughter required careful negotiation of family expectations, particularly in a cultural context where women's primary obligation is often assumed to be domestic. The fact that she was able to do it at all was largely because her mother was home with the children — providing the childcare that made it possible for Mohini to be out in the field building the business.

She frames it not as a problem solved but as a reality acknowledged: women often cannot build scalable businesses without either family support or the resources to outsource domestic work. She was fortunate in having the former. Many are not.

Work in Silence, Let Results Speak

Mohini's mantra for building through doubt and criticism is simple: do not argue. Work in silence. Let results speak.

The first thousand days of a business require total focus and total commitment, not divided attention spent responding to people who question whether the idea is sound. The people who matter — the women who are building alongside her, the families who are being served by the products, the lakhpatis who are proving the model works — are not the ones expressing doubt. Let them prove the model.

Consistency and patience, she argues, are the only real formula for business success. Everything else — timing, luck, market conditions — is secondary to the decision to keep showing up.

Entering Retail: Stay Fine Supermarkets

Mohini and her business partner recognised that they had built a network of thirty thousand loyal customers — and those customers still needed to buy daily essentials somewhere. The insight led to Stay Fine Supermarkets.

The first store opened in Thane in September 2024, with subsequent openings planned in Santacruz (January), Juhu (February 26), and then Alibaug and Koparkhairane near Panvel. Each store operates on a model deliberately designed for sustainability: the margin per product is just one rupee — barely covering operational costs — but the purpose is not to extract maximum profit from each transaction. The purpose is to create a destination for the community where the network can gather and shop.

More importantly, each supermarket is being run by a woman entrepreneur from the Stay Fine network. The retail expansion is not concentrating wealth and power in the organisation's centre. It is distributing opportunity to the women who have already built it.

The Roadmap to 2050

Suraj Kumar Kumbhar, the business partner, has outlined a detailed roadmap for the company extending to 2050 — planning that goes far beyond what most businesses attempt.

The roadmap includes establishing an in-house manufacturing facility on fifty acres with imported machinery from China, vertical integration of production, and the expansion of the network and retail presence across India and potentially beyond. It is planning on a scale that assumes the business will continue growing for decades at a pace that requires genuinely structural investment.

Mohini's role in this planning is to oversee the human dimension — the community, the culture, the alignment of the women who are building this with the larger vision that is being articulated. The business has two engines: Suraj's market and operational vision, and Mohini's community and culture leadership.

The Invitation She Extends

Mohini closes with an invitation directed specifically at women who feel stuck — without capital, without freedom, without a clear direction for their lives.

Stay Fine is built as a platform for precisely that woman. The company provides product training, leadership coaching, and access to a network of other women who are building their own financial independence. The entry barrier is intentionally low. The support structure is intentionally comprehensive. The income opportunity is grounded in real products and real recommendations rather than in pressure to recruit.

Her message is simple: you do not need permission from outside. You do not need a perfect plan. You do not need connections. You need the conviction that you can build something, the willingness to sit in the dirt if necessary, and the patience to let it grow.