Today we’d like to introduce you to Siddhi Bansal.
Hi Siddhi, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
A few months after COVID hit, a small business owned by my relative was struggling to get any business. Although I’d heard that businesses were failing, I did not imagine the severity: gaining debts and loans but losing profits and homes. I began to research about the role of small businesses and read about how small businesses are vital to our economy. After my eyes opened to this pervasive problem, I decided to start ShopUnityy, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about and encouraging people to buy from small businesses.
In January 2021, I started an Instagram page, @shopunityy, and began posting. The objective of my page is to spread awareness about different small businesses in the community and describe the benefits of shopping local in order to encourage my audience to support neighborhood businesses. I also conducted “small businesses tours” by visiting different local businesses that I’d promoted on my page and talked to them about ShopUnityy’s objective. I received a lot of positive feedback and got the opportunity to speak at a radio show too. Now, @shopunityy has 700+ followers, and I’m so glad that I’ve been able to make such a large impact on my community.
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?
Throughout the process of launching and spreading an organization, I faced various challenges. When I initially started ShopUnityy, I sent my initiative to a lot of my friends and family but was still not able to gather more than 80 followers, which was very little considering the impact I wanted ShopUnityy to create. I found it difficult to spread the word to people in the Dallas community because I did not just want my schoolmates to shop local, but also local Dallasites who were willing to try and explore new products and places. Slowly, I was able to gain traction and began gathering more followers by exploring new accounts, partnering up in follow-chain messages, messaging small businesses and informing them about ShopUnityy. The first few weeks of the launch were hard considering the fact that I did not reach many people, but as I increased the number of posts and my engagement with the online Dallas community, I was able to attract more locals to my page and impact their lives.
Slowly, I also began to receive messages from small businesses in my community that wanted me to promote their businesses. I received an invitation to talk at a radio show about ShopUnityy and how small businesses were affected by COVID-19. When I conducted some neighborhood small-business tours, some shops told me that they would promote my page on their websites too. Additionally, the bandwagon mindset of shopping from large businesses was hard to simply defeat. Everyone assumes that since large businesses are more prevalent, they’re easier to trust and their quality is always the best. What people don’t realize is that the promotion of just shopping from these national brands is not always beneficial to the local economy. This was one mindset that I had to contradict and so initially, a lot of my posts were focused on simply explaining the impact of a small business – why should a person shop small, or what impact do small businesses really create on the economy? These were questions that I had to answer, and although I knew that there were people who would not agree with me, I had to keep moving on and encourage my community to shop local.
Even though this road started off rocky, my involvement and participation with the community gave me the opportunity to tell more people about ShopUnityy and truly create an impact on my community.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a rising senior in high school at The Hockaday School and am very passionate about making an impact in my community. Other than ShopUnityy, I’m a part of other community service activities like IntelliChoice Tutoring (math tutoring to Dallas ISD kids) and am also making an impact in India, where I’m an administrator at my family charity, which helps students in Indian Blind, Deaf, and Dumb Schools. I’m also an assistant teacher for Bharatnatyam and Indian classical dance and I conduct virtual lessons for students learning this dance in India.
All of these activities keep me occupied and help me magnify my impact on the community. Other than this, I spend my time in other extracurricular activities. For example, I’m the president of the UT Texas Regional Science Olympiad Club at my school and the Vice President of New/Gen Hockaday (a student advocacy club for women’s rights). I’m also a World Schools debater and participate in a variety of competitions which gives me the ability to voice my opinion along while simultaneously providing me the opportunity to learn more about pressing issues in the world today.
What’s next?
I’m looking to expand ShopUnityy to different platforms and cities. I’m in the process of expanding to Houston and possibly some other cities outside Texas. I will also begin to target other types of businesses like convenience stores, car wash centers, gas pumps and health-care centers to amplify the purpose of ShopUnityy, which is to help support all kinds of small businesses.
Contact Info:
- Email: shopunityy21@gmail.com
- Instagram: @shopunityy
Image Credits
Siddhi Bansal, Sweata Bansal
