Vineeta Singh, a Shark Tank India judge, was initially concerned that street vendors might obscure the view of her company's Colaba Causeway store in Mumbai.
However, she eventually discovered that one of these exact stalls was largely responsible for the store's success. Singh noted a dramatic increase in sales at the Colaba store last month.
"Last 12 months we started seeing this store sales explode and were also tracking lots of 1 lakh+ bills, so I went to find out what's going on!", she wrote on LinkedIn.
According to Singh's LinkedIn post, the "fastest growing cohort of customers in Colaba is Arab women who visit Mumbai for medical tourism," and they "love Indian makeup because they also have warm undertones like us and they need products that suit hot weather.
These same women used to buy local fruits from a booth in front of her shop manned by a father-son duo who would ask them in Arabic whether they wanted "Kahaal Al Hindi," which translates to Indian kajals.
However, the situation is not one-sided. When there aren't any customers at Suraj and his father's fruit stall, they are invited for tea in the AC at the store, where an employee named Megha learns some Arabic from them, which she uses to remind their Arab customers to buy some authentic Indian fruits from the stall as they leave.
Singh ended her post by saying that "India is truly a land of entrepreneurs" and that "it is the people who make the biggest difference - and sometimes people who don't even belong to the system."