From a Facebook mehedi art page to making her own mehedi, with 128 women on the team

A girl from an ordinary family in Naogaon, studying marketing at North South University in Dhaka, became disheartened when her seventh-semester results were poor. The day after the results, she saw a mehedi live session on Facebook and on 5 May 2019 opened a page called Mehedi by Mimi. She learned designs by watching the internet. According to Prothom Alo, work began arriving three months after opening the page, and by the end of 2019 she had added a few team members. At first she got no family support and classmates mocked her. When Covid stopped mehedi evenings she earned in dollars doing mehedi work online. Because people kept asking which mehedi to buy, she began making her own in April 2021, with raw material coming from Sojat in Rajasthan, India. There are now separate teams for making mehedi, preparing parcels, writing order slips and running the page, with 128 women working, some students, some housewives and some divorced. She holds mehedi art training every two months. Her page has over 4.5 lakh likes and over 5.5 lakh followers. Her husband handles bringing in raw material, VAT, tax and licences.