Embracing Meraki
We devote the vast majority of our lives to our jobs. Six days a week, from 10 am to 6 pm (sometimes even longer), we work tirelessly to excel in our role and earn our salary. The stress and pressure of any job can take a toll on your mental health, it is only normal. But that’s why it is so important to spend your precious time doing something that you truly love and are passionate about.
Damini Arora is a marketing expert, worked a regular desk job for two years in Mumbai. As an avid traveller, she grew frustrated having to sit behind a desk for so long. So, in 2018, she decided to go on a sabbatical for a month. She came across the opportunity to volunteer with a trekking company to teach people in remote villages how to dispose of their waste properly. And that is how Damini found herself in Uttarakhand.
While she originally took up the role so that she would find something off-beat and productive to do with her time while living in the mountains, Damini truly fell in love with the idea of educating and helping people. She herself had to study and learn so much about waste management and protecting the environment as her group would go to schools to teach young children how to segregate and manage their waste correctly. Since there was no landfill in the village, the residents were thought by tourists to burn their waste. Damini and the rest of the team had to physically teach them to separate their waste and would then transport it to Dehradun.
When she told her friends what she was doing, their immediate response was, “Why?” They told her to leave this kind of work to activists and to focus on the career instead. But Damini knew that these causes needed more attention. She spent a month at the village helping the villagers and then moved to Spiti to volunteer at a small cafe that donated some of its proceeds to educate underprivileged girls. Eventually, she went back to Mumbai and had to take up her old job as she didn’t know what else to do in the city. But after working with several clients whose products she didn’t believe in; she knew it was time for a change.
On 15th January 2021, Damini decided that it was time to put her marketing skills to use and launched her own digital marketing company, Truly Meraki. The name comes from the Greek word Meraki that translates to putting in your mind, soul and heart into whatever you’re doing. And that’s exactly what Damini is doing now.
Truly Meraki, which consists of Damini and her team of 4, markets sustainable and eco-friendly small businesses and NGOs through social media, blogs and performance marketing. One of the first clients that Damini got on board was Daily Dump. They are one of India’s biggest home compost manufactures. Their brand revolves around making composting available to everyone, no matter if you live in an apartment in the city or a bungalow in a suburb.
Another company that Damini works with is Brown Living, India’s first ever plastic-free and sustainable marketplace. They are the perfect Make in India alternative to marketplaces such as Amazon where you can shop for your personal and home care needs along with food, drink and clothing options.
According to Damini, running Truly Meraki isn’t a job anymore but something that she just loves doing. She feels extremely satisfied knowing that she’s helping her clients make such an amazing difference to the world.
She believes that smaller brands like the ones she works with need to be in good hands because they face so much competition for these big companies that have an unlimited marketing budget at their disposal. She wants to ensure that when we users look for sustainable and eco-friendly options, we find and support these smaller home-grown businesses instead of larger MNCs. Her main aim at Truly Meraki is to promote these businesses to the best of her abilities with whatever budget they can afford to spare.
Damini Arora is committed to uplifting those who do good for others, and Truly Meraki isn’t the only way she’s doing that. She also runs a ‘gift a tree’ service known as Truly Earthly in collaboration with NGOs to help restore the Aarey Forest. You can read more about Truly Earthly here!
Written By Jessica Albuquerque,
Week 37, September 2021
