When Pooja Sengupta landed in Australia from Chennai, it wasn’t just the change of place that took its toll on her. “I felt nearly invisible.

Everyone was better dressed than I was,” she muses. “It’s there that my sense of fashion evolved. And then, when I came back to Chennai, I couldn’t find anything interesting to wear.

Things I had worn five years ago were only just beginning to enter the malls and that too very slowly. So, I started a Facebook page called ‘Dropped Pin’ where I posted pictures of clothes and accessories that I loved and purchased online from international vendors.”

Pooja’s idea was a huge hit, and she soon launched www.droppedpin.net. Now the online store offers international clothes and accessories for men, women and kids. “There’s even a designer showcase now. It’s not like I’m a huge fashionista but I follow fashion blogs from around the world and trends too, and make them available to local customers as soon as I can,” she says.

With “Refer a Friend, Gift Certificates” and international shipping, the site boasts of a lot of firsts for Chennaiites. “I place orders with vendors abroad and first have the merchandise delivered to me. After a quality check, I ship it out to the clients,” she explains.

For the socially conscious, there are more incentives to buy from the e- store, www.chaani.in. Vidyuth Sreenivasan’s brand, Chaani, sources handmade cotton shirts from a village in Tamil Nadu.

“When you buy a Chaani product you contribute to lighting the fire in the kitchens of rural Tamil Nadu. Chaani, meaning dung, is used as cooking fuel in villages in India even today,”

he explains. Following a sustainable social enterprise model, Vidyuth offers a working capital to rural handloom workers and also buys back products from them. “I am also working out a profit-sharing model for them,” he adds.