“I love cooking and everything, but it does take a lot of time."
Entrepreneur Shelly Nuruzzaman began a side hustle from her kitchen table and it has turned into a six-figure business.
Previously a scientist, Shelly swapped the laboratory for her kitchen after she had her second child, where she spent two years perfecting her BANG! Curry kits.
In 2014, Shelly began her business with £650.
She tested recipes and organised cookery classes in her home, going to food markets and building the website herself.
But after a lot of dedication, the brand sold over 750,000 kits in the first five years and now has a multi-six-figure turnover.
Things took off just before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Shelly told The Sun: “It was at a point where I was spending a lot more time at home after having my two boys.
“I had more time to cook because I wasn’t working full time. And so I had this inspiration about how I could turn my cooking skills I’ve had since I was a little girl [into a business].
“I’ve always had these recipes that I’ve made again and again, and they’re all curry dishes because my heritage is Bangladeshi.
“I grew up around Brick Lane and I learned everything from my mum.
“Food has always been part of the family, but I was always too busy. I had two careers before having children, and I started the business with the idea that anyone can make this type of food.”
But after not returning to work, money was tight.
Shelly explained her business idea to her husband Mark and things quickly progressed.
“I came up with ideas all the time. I mentioned it to my partner, Mark, I said, ‘What do you think?’
“But this was the first idea that we both really ran with, and in five minutes we had the brand name.
“It took about a year to get to the good curries where it was consistent. It wasn’t easy.”
Shelly admitted that lots of people doubted her initially, with some telling her, “Isn’t that just a spice mix?” or “Do people really want that? I can make my own curry”.
But with Shelly’s curry kits, you can make a meal from scratch, with hardly any effort involved.
“The premise of these kits is that you don’t have to understand how to do anything with regards to spices or the ingredients.
“The range themselves are easy-to-use curry kits, and they all contain all the spices you need for your flavouring.
“They also contain another sachet which has the onion, garlic and ginger which anyone that makes curry dishes will know that that’s pretty much the most mundane part.
“I love cooking and everything, but it does take a lot of time.
“So we’ve put all the elements in so you just need to hydrate with water and then pop it in a pan, and then you have your homemade curry sauce literally in five minutes.
“And that’s pretty much how all of them work.”
To raise funds, Shelly ran cookery lessons from her home, where she would charge people up to £90 to attend, making around £400 profit per class.
As well as trading at local farmers’ markets and investing, Shelly created brand awareness.
Her company was eventually picked up by recipe box delivery service HelloFresh.
The entrepreneur said: “We landed our contract with HelloFresh, and that’s pretty much what launched the brand.”
But whilst fulfilling their HelloFresh content, Shelly’s business was still based at home, so things needed to change.
She continued: “We had to really turn that around so quickly. We had to hire an industrial kitchen and get hold of an industrial piece of equipment.
“There was quite a lot of DIY stuff going on with the machinery, but we managed it, and we pulled out the bag. That was quite an exciting time.”
Speaking about the effect the Covid-19 had, Shelly said:
“We obviously hit the pandemic and so we made a decision where we decided to set up online and it was the best thing we could have done.
“We were in the right place at the right time. Home cooking was for obvious reasons, really up there for health and the fact that nobody was going out.
“And so, you know, for us, the business really accelerated. It helped scale us.”
“We became Amazon’s best seller for curry kits and best sellers for lots of our ranges.”
Since then, the business has continued to grow. It is now stocked in Waitrose.
The BANG! Curry team has also grown, as Shelly stated:
“We’ve got a manufacturing team, and that’s a team of five or six that are the core of the business.
“Then we’ve got a sales and marketing team, which is a team of three, and that includes myself. We’re still a very slim team.
“And then we have another marketing team that focuses on things like PR social media, which is so key to any business. So that’s the triage of our business.”
Her life has changed due to her business:
“The biggest attraction for having your own business is to be able to determine your own hours.
“It’s not an eight-hour job – sometimes it’s 12 hours, sometimes it’s what it has to be if you want to drive the business forward, you just have to put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it.
“But if my child has a sports day, I can take time out. I can work around that and this is where I really love what I do and the working arrangement I have.
“[My life has] completely changed. I’ve learned so much in terms of how to run a business and how to manage my time well.
“Every day is a learning day, and it’s exciting. It’s completely changed my life. My personal salary has gone up and up and up.”
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