What I Didn’t Know About Social Businesses Before Starting Love Handmade

By Zein Ahmed

Before Love Handmade, I had built businesses.

I understood what it takes.

The first few years are hard. You work 17–18 hours a day. Seven days a week. You miss out on life.

But you push through because you know— around year four, things begin to ease.

Systems start working. Teams stabilize. You build buffers.

The chaos becomes manageable.

That’s what I thought would happen again.

I was wrong.

This Is Not a “Normal” Business Curve

What I was completely unprepared for… was how different a social business is when it is built around people—not just profit.

Love Handmade works with rural, home-based artisans.

And what I didn’t understand was this:

Their lives are not stable enough to support “business as usual.”

Every year, we have faced something unexpected.

Floods. Illness. Economic shocks. Family crises. Supply disruptions.

Not once. But repeatedly.

It often feels like we are constantly putting out fires.

The Difference No One Talks About

In a traditional for-profit business, when challenges arise:

• You replace staff
• You optimize for efficiency
• You prioritize output

Because the goal is profit.

But when your business is built around the most vulnerable—you cannot do that.

You cannot replace a woman because her village flooded. You cannot “optimize” away someone’s illness. You cannot walk away from people whose lives you are trying to stabilize.

Because the goal is not just profit.

The goal is people.

And that changes everything.

The Uphill Climb I Didn’t Anticipate

I did not realize how steep this path would be.

Because I did not fully understand the system the poor live in.

They live in a world where:

• There are no safety nets
• A single crisis can wipe out months of income
• Access to healthcare, transport, and resources is fragile
• Climate events like floods are not rare—they are recurring

There is no buffer.

No fallback.

No margin for error.

The Cost of Being Poor

And perhaps the hardest truth to confront was this:

Life is more expensive for those who have the least.

• They buy in small quantities—so they pay more
• They borrow at higher costs—so they stay in debt
• They lose work more easily—so income is inconsistent

Everything is harder. Everything is more fragile.

Why Social Businesses Struggle to “Scale Like Startups”

There is a narrative around scaling.

Growth curves. Efficiency. Margins.

But when you are building with people who are navigating constant instability—

your growth is not linear.

It is uneven. Interrupted. Human.

And that doesn’t fit neatly into traditional business expectations.

So Why Do This Work At All?

Because once you see this reality—you cannot unsee it.

You realize that the problem is not a lack of skill, or effort, or ambition.

The problem is structural.

And if businesses like ours don’t exist—then the most vulnerable remain excluded from economic systems entirely.

What I Wish I Knew

I wish I knew that:

• This would take longer than any business I had built before
• The challenges would not decrease—they would evolve
• Success would not be measured only in revenue, but in resilience

And most of all—I wish I knew that building with the most vulnerable means building without the safety nets most businesses rely on.

And Yet…

Despite everything—this work matters.

Because every time we get it right, even in small ways—

• A woman earns consistently
• A child stays in school
• A family moves one step away from crisis

It is slow.

It is hard.

But it is real.

In the End

Love Handmade is not just a business navigating growth.

It is a business navigating reality.

And that reality is messy, unpredictable, and deeply unequal.

But it is also where the work is needed most.