KUALA LUMPUR: Good food comes from home. And with the existence of the online sphere, a housewife has demonstrated home-cooked dishes can be translated into a good business model.
Aziana Muhamad started making curry puffs and other Malaysian delicacies out of love for cooking six months ago, selling them to neighbours and friends in and around her home in Rawang.
After setting up a website to promote her products, she is getting orders for her pastries from as far as Penang.
The 41-year-old mother-of-two is one of the few small-medium enterprises (SMEs) that have signed up as early birds for Google's Get Malaysian Businesses Online (GMBO) programme earlier this month.
After Google consultants helped set up her website, byhandbyheart.com.my, she has seen her income shoot up by 30 per cent this month alone, all from the comfort of her home.
“There are no added preservatives in my products, I basically use the same ingredients I would use if I were to eat the curry puff myself. This appeals to the people,” she told The Malay Mail during the official launch of MBGO at Double Tree by Hilton yesterday.
With the rise in revenue, Aziana has managed to buy a machine to make her pastries and is planning to expand her “menu”.
“There is no point in concentrating on local pastries alone, I plan to cater to a larger group of people. I can't sit quiet at home, so now I'm learning how to make good lasagnas and even pizzas,” she said.
Hiral Doshi, a 26-yearold twinkle-eyed designer, is also carving out a name for herself just by working from home, again, thanks to her website.
Just like Aziana, she migrated from her blog to set up a website under the MBGO programme earlier this month and has since seen her revenue rise by 40 per cent.
“I used to go to boutiques myself to sell my products, such as laces, but since the website came about, they have been calling me to order a concession of my products.”
The former auditor has now expanded to designing heels and purses with the signature ZD — for her design line called Zenith Divas.
Asked whether she plans to open a boutique, Hiral is more than content to maintain her online clientele, which includes customers from as far away as Mauritius and Australia.
“The price remains cheap when it's online, without all the overheads. It caters more to people this way.”
Hiral's products can be seen online at zenithdivas.com.my.
Get online, Google tells businesses
TWO-THIRDS of Malaysians are Internet users, yet only a third of local smallmedium enterprises (SMEs) have a website.
Because of cost and maintenance fears, many SMEs do not have an online presence to complement their businesses.
Over the next year, Google Malaysia is aiming to change that.
With their newly-launched Get Malaysian Businesses Online (GMBO) programme, it is aimed to help at least 50,000 SMEs go online over the next 12 months.
“There are around 700,000 registered SMEs in Malaysia. But only 100,000 of them have a website. We want to gradually bring in this 600,000 businesses online as well,” said Google Malaysia country manager Sajith Sivanandan during the GMBO launch at Intermark yesterday.
He said Google will provide free domains and designs for the first 10,000 SMEs to join the programme.
"Malaysia has some 17.5 million Internet users. So that's a huge market that these SMEs are missing out on.”
Google is also providing an efficient method to set up a website for these SMEs — they claim they could help set up one within 30 minutes.
“It only takes 30 minutes to help set up a website based on the templates that we offer. This is thanks to a new website tool that we are introducing in Malaysia,” said Sajith.
He said this is the first programme of its kind in the Asia Pacific region.
“I don't think we at Google will do a programme more significant than this for a long time from now and there is no better time to introduce a programme like this.”
Sajith also hopes GMBO will become a “vocabulary” for SMEs in Malaysia.
GMBO was launched by Information, Communications, and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Utama Dr Rais Yatim yesterday.
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