For Aanchal Kejriwal, it all started during the pandemic. People were stuck at home, trying to use the same space to work, eat, play and sleep — suddenly, space became suffocating, it became a constraint. Kejriwal had always been an organised person, and soon, she found herself helping friends to create systems in the house to organise and optimise their space. She was curious whether she could take this up professionally. And so during peak-Covid lockdown, she decided to hold a seven-day decluttering challenge to gauge people’s interest.
She put it up on Instagram that she would be giving people tips to declutter their room over seven days. “We divided it into smaller tasks. One day, you just clean your wardrobe, one day just organise your shoes. And we had one day which was a ‘Mend it’ day, where you fix things which are broken, maybe stitch a button which has come loose. Because these things keep lying there forever and ever, and we never get to it,” says Kejriwal. The response she got was overwhelming: almost 80 people signed up, some even telling her she had given them food for thought for their entire lives. “Honestly, this COVID challenge is what validated my idea of starting this company. The kind of response I got from people made me sure that yes, people really need this.” Soon after, Kejriwal officially launched ‘Arrange It All,’ a company which offers organising and decluttering services.
The concept itself is nothing new. It was pioneered by Japanese author Marie Kondo, whose 2010 book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising explored how putting your space in order leads to corresponding changes in lifestyle and perspective. The idea soon spread to India, with the last few years seeing a proliferation of tidying coaches and decluttering experts across the country. The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, provided a fillip to the industry: as people started spending all their time indoors, their perspective to space changed. The same space had to be used by a number of family members, for varied purposes. Organisation became more important than ever before; and organising experts increasingly found their services in high demand.
