Why did she choose to break away? "In a large agency, I had no control over my design output. I’d ask if we could print on paper napkins, and the production manager would just turn around and say no." Freshers on the creative team, she says, were expected to write copy, sketch visuals and go home. There was little involvement with the total design process. Which was not what this NID graduate was looking for.

Take off. So, Manchanda did the next best thing. And that was to set up shop on her own. It wasn’t easy. Newly wed, she and husband Girish Raj had just moved to Bangalore. The young couple had no savings that could be used to start a business. Investing Rs 20,000 on peripherals and with an old 386 computer, Manchanda started work from one room in her new home.

Says Manchanda: "For a woman in the world of start-up business, insecurity is a very real fear." She couldn’t refuse to take on even the most unsavoury clients. Bereft of the support structure that a corporate office provides, Manchanda found herself adrift. And, for the first few months, she found herself running from pillar to post, getting printouts from a neighbouring computer centre, meeting clients, and at the same time creating top-notch design work.

Manchanda’s creative work, coupled with astute money management and some luck, saw Esign post a healthy turnover of Rs 35 lakh in just three years, with profits after tax of Rs 8.7 lakh. The company had by now signed up retainer contracts with four major clients, and Manchanda began to hire more talent to take her creative team to eight members.

Most people would have rested on their oars now and let the business drift along. Being on a retainer meant companies would pay up every month but would only throw Esign occasional scraps of work that often had little to do with design. Manchanda was making money, but her business was going nowhere. "We were being under-utilised, and one day I decided I’d had enough and just stopped sending in the retainer bills," she says. With contracts on hand worth between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh a month, it was not an easy decision to take.

Bold break. Instead of being on a retainership, Manchanda wanted clients to hire Esign as design consultants and pay per project. For many clients, this went against the grain, and they severed business ties with Esign. Naturally, this left the company with acute cash flow problems. Luckily for Manchanda, husband Raj was by then heading advertising agency McCann Erikson in Bangalore, and was earning enough to be able to support Esign. For six months, the couple pumped in over Rs 2.5 lakh of their personal funds to keep the company going, while Manchanda aggressively scouted around for new assignments.

Says Raj, who was by then the primary sounding board for the start-up: "The insecurity led to the making of a totally new work culture." Pantaloon, the retail major and now one of Esign’s largest clients, asked for a visual merchandise design for one of its stores–an order worth around Rs 70,000. But Manchanda scented opportunity and went far beyond her brief to design a communication package for the entire chain using both visual and print media.

Intrigued, Pantaloon asked her to design the ‘look’ for a proposed hypermarket, the now-ubiquitous Big Bazaar. As they had no Indian examples to draw from, the couple invested in a trip to Singapore to study the malls there. Says Raj: "It paid off. Revenues from that client alone are now worth Rs 50 lakh."

There has been no looking back ever since. With capitalised billings of Rs 5 crore, it was time for Esign to acquire a business chief. Says Raj: "Once Esign could afford me, I quit my job to oversee business and finance, so that Sonia and her team could focus on what they do best, top-notch design."

Manchanda’s go-for-broke approach to business is, however, not reflected in finance management at Esign, which is run on the lines of a thrifty household. The only outstanding debt exposure after seven years was Rs 1 lakh from an old computer loan.

Now, with business booming, Esign is raising debt finance of Rs 45 lakh for a new design studio to house the 15-member team and the Esign mascot Xena, a blue-black Great Dane. By betting everything to realise a deep-rooted conviction, Manchanda transformed a tiny SoHo into a business with potential.