Hi, I am Divyesh Yeluri, a 16 year old (in 2021) that likes to play basketball & learn about the world of economics and business. Here is how I started Towelight:

How did I come up with the idea? Well, one day in 2019 (age 14) I came out the shower and was wiping my self off as usual and noticed that a musty smell was coming off the towel, naturally I googled why and found out that towels are a perfect breeding ground for bacteria to reproduce as it's wet. I quickly realized that this was extremely gross and I knew that I wasn't the only one who was experiencing this. So, I started researching to see why towels stink and how to prevent them from doing so. After making a rough plan I asked my father for help (finance), He ended up really liking my pitch of an antimicrobial towel and thought of it as a good product to diversify his existing company (Nova Agri Tech Ltd) to a small extent.

While designing the towel, I added an additional USP apart from the antimicrobial treatment which I now call "face-labelling", it's basically a separate section on the towel exclusively for the face. To explain this feature I'm going to make use of a hypothetical: let's say on Monday you wipe your butt with the top part of the towel and the next day (Tuesday) you wipe your face with that same top part, just imagine how grim that is, you maybe fully clean but it still doesn't feel right which is why I implemented this feature (it's for the semi-germophobes like me). So now Towelight protects you physically and mentally from bacteria.

The hardest part of this journey was finding a manufacturer because antimicrobial application on textiles was very rare at the time and even if the manufacturers did offer the antimicrobial treatment they would do so at a large quantities which I simply couldn't afford to risk. It took me 4 months to find a suitable antimicrobial solution supplier and a manufacturer willing apply it. I finally found a small textile manufacturing unit in Coimbatore and started communicating with them for a test batch of towels. The towels arrived in Jan 2020 and we had a rough beginning due to the pandemic but picked up our pace by the end of the year. Soon after the first batch, I switched manufacturers because the budget increased and it was one of the best decisions I ever made for Towelight, the delivery and quality of the new batch was perfect and here we are.

Out of all the features that the Towelight Towel has, I am most proud of it's self-cleaning capability. The antimicrobial treatment on the towel makes it essentially self-cleaning which means that it can be washed 3-4x less than regular towels making it the perfect bath towel for people who care about the environment that want to save electricity or water in any way they can or just busy people in general who want to save their valuable time & not spend it on doing laundry. I am happy with my attempt to satisfy the needs & wants of a large population. These towels can be used by people ranging from infants (parents of infants who want to keep their new-born away from bacteria) to senior citizens (who find a difficulty in doing laundry).

I believe that the anti-microbial towels that we produce with the face labeling feature provide more value than any other towel in the market to the consumers and environment at the moment.

You can connect with me via LinkedIn

Milestones: