How Seven Women Built a Business Without a Factory
What if your business is growing, but the place where the work happens is no longer enough?
Most businesses would look for more space. A bigger office. A bigger factory. More machines, more infrastructure. But in 1959, seven women in Mumbai faced exactly that problem — and chose a very different path.
They didn’t build a factory. They changed where the work happened.
It started with seven women
In 1959, seven women in Girgaum, Mumbai, came together with a simple idea: make and sell papads. They borrowed ₹80 to buy the ingredients and produced their first four packets.
As demand grew, so did the need for production space. At first, the women worked from a terrace. But eventually, even that space wasn’t enough. And that is where the interesting part of the story begins.
The problem wasn’t the business — it was the system
When the terrace became crowded, the obvious solution would have been to find a larger place. Instead, the women changed the production model.
Prepared dough was taken to their homes. Different women continued the work from different locations. The finished products then came back together for weighing, packaging and selling.
The location had changed — the business had not.
A small shift created a different kind of scale
This is what makes the Lijjat story interesting. The breakthrough wasn’t simply making more papads. It was separating where the work happened from how the business operated.
The work could be distributed. But the standards stayed common. That distinction matters, because decentralising work without coordination can create chaos. Different homes could develop different ways of doing things. Quality could vary. Processes could drift.
So the model depended on two things holding together: common standards, and bringing the finished work back to one place. The homes were separate. The business wasn’t.
The lesson for today’s businesses
We often assume growth means adding more. More people. More space. More technology. More infrastructure. But sometimes the better question is: do we need more — or do we need to work differently?
- A space constraint may actually be a process problem.
- A people constraint may actually be a role-design problem.
- A productivity problem may actually be a workflow problem.
- A growth problem may sometimes be a business-model problem.
The answer isn’t always to build a bigger system. Sometimes it’s to build a smarter one.
The small shift
Lijjat’s story offers a simple reminder: when the old way stops scaling, don’t immediately make the old way bigger. First, question the way the work is organised.
The biggest change doesn’t always look big when it begins. Sometimes it’s just a small shift in where the work happens — and when that shift lets more people contribute, holds quality steady, and keeps one business at the centre, a borrowed ₹80 and four packets of papad can grow into something far larger than any single factory could ever have held.
Before you build a bigger system, ask whether you simply need a different one.