Bringing Equality in Business: Manpriya and Navneet’s Story of Empowerment

• Everybody deserves to feel free.
• LGBTQIA+ people deserve to be able to openly express themselves
• Women have as much capability to be leaders as men do. If not more.

Our vision is to facilitate a world where women and LGBTQ+ people can be themselves. That is why we decided to start our own business, Caked India. We envisioned a business where we could employ women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and then train and empower them to become entrepreneurs and financially independent.

“Everybody deserves to feel free.”

Our love story encapsulates our complementary life mantras: we are enough for each other, and we are constantly growing as a result. Our goal is to create a world where women and LGBTQ+ people can be themselves.

Manpriya’s mother, who ran a salon and trained women there, provided the initial inspiration. At Caked, we don’t just teach women how to do a craft—we also teach them how to run a business. We want them to see that there are options for living life independently and on their own terms.

We never imagined that we would be involved in this type of business because we came from different backgrounds. Manpriya had always wanted to be involved in something creative and pursued filmmaking—despite the advice of others. She carried on the values she learned in school when she discovered Caked to earn money to make her own films. Caked was a way for Navneet, who faced bullying before moving to Delhi and truly discovering and understanding her sexuality, to make a ripple effect of impact.

We have had setbacks setbacks and difficulties. Because we are women, suppliers will not take us seriously. During a business talk with a group of friends, everyone would look at the men for confirmation even if we have experience in running successful entrepreneurship. We persevered tenacity, which this patriarchal society believes women should not have.

In the coming years, we hope to grow Caked into an enterprise with multiple units run by our team members and empower 1 lakh people in the next ten years at least. In this capitalistic world, we want to deviate from the conventional setup. Our larger vision is to grow Caked into a business model as a community, similar to a social enterprise that generates income while still equalizing profit among its people.

Women and LGBTQIA+ members deserve to be looked at as regular human beings. We deserve to have as many opportunities for leadership as men do. Caked aims to ensure that women and LGBTQIA+ members are provided with equal opportunities. Everybody deserves to feel free, and Manpriya and Navneet are driven by the vision of making that happen.