Most startup stories have a clean arc.
Problem identified. Team assembled. Product built. Investment secured. Growth achieved.
Mine doesn't look like that.
Mine looks like a family losing everything in 2017, seven years of rebuilding in survival mode, two brothers starting a business with more determination than capital, a mountain of debt, delayed payments, forced discounts, and then — somehow — standing in the Shark Tank India studio in February 2026 pitching a product we built from nothing.
This is the story of those nine years. The real version.
The Collapse
In 2017, my father's packaging company hit the wall.
Chetna Packaging wasn't a startup. It was a real business built over real years in a real industry. Packaging is one of those industries that sounds boring until you realise how much of the physical economy runs through it. My father knew it deeply. The business was his life's work.
When it collapsed, it didn't just take the business. It took the income, the security, the sense of stability that a family builds its daily life on. It also left debt — and when a business fails, the debt doesn't disappear. It just moves.
I was 28. I got married the following year, 2018 — during what were genuinely some of the hardest months of our family's life. My wife married into a situation that was far from stable, and she stayed anyway. That matters more than I can properly express.
For the next several years, the question was never "how do I scale?" It was always "how do we get through this month?"
I want you to sit with that for a moment. Because I think when people read startup stories, they often skip past the survival years. They're unglamorous. They're repetitive. They're not particularly inspiring to narrate.
But they're where character is actually built.
The Idea That Wouldn't Leave
Even through those years, my brother and I kept coming back to the same thing.
We'd grown up inside a packaging business. We understood the industry — the suppliers, the minimums, the margins, the logistics. And we kept seeing a problem that nobody seemed to be solving properly.
Small businesses were getting blocked by packaging — not just by cost, but by every part of the process.
The quantity wall. 500 units minimum. 1000 units minimum. Sometimes 2000. For someone selling 50 products a month, that's not a supplier. That's a full stop.
The design wall. Most small sellers don't have a graphic designer. Professional packaging design costs money and time most small businesses can't spare. So they either paid for it — adding hundreds to an already tight budget — or they went unbranded, which made their product look less valuable than it was.
The uncertainty wall. You place an order based on a flat design file. You wait three weeks. The boxes arrive and something looks different from what you imagined. The colour is slightly off. The logo placement looks different at real size. You've already paid. You can't go back.
The process wall. Getting packaging in India traditionally meant phone calls, site visits, email chains that go on for days, a quote that arrives a week later, and then figuring out pickup and delivery yourself.
We thought every single one of these was solvable. And we solved them.
08/08/2023: What We Built
We launched ezpac.in on August 8th, 2023.
The centrepiece of ezpac is something we're genuinely proud of: a self-service 3D design studio.
You open it yourself. You design your own branded packaging — your logo, your colours, your layout — directly in the studio. No professional designer needed. No design experience required. The tools are built to be simple and intuitive, the kind of thing you can pick up and use in minutes without a tutorial.
And as you design, you see your packaging rendered in real-time 3D. Exactly as it will look when it's printed. Exactly how it will look on your shelf, in your customer's hands, in their unboxing photo. What you see is precisely what you get. The uncertainty wall, completely demolished.
Beyond the studio:
Custom dimensions — your product's exact size. Not a standard box that almost fits. Not a generic option from a catalogue. Yours, measured for what you're actually selling.
Starting from 10 units — not 500, not 100, ten. Enough to launch, test a new product, or fulfil a first batch — without committing to inventory you don't need yet. The quantity wall, gone.
Instant process — design in the studio, approve your 3D preview, place your order. No phone calls. No email chains. No week-long wait for a quote. The process wall, eliminated.
Doorstep delivery — order on the platform, receive at your door. No coordinating with couriers. No warehouse pickups. The logistics wall, removed.
The customers this attracts are exactly the people who've been underserved by the industry for years — home bakers, D2C founders, handmade sellers, small retailers. And they're loyal, because we solved problems nobody else bothered solving for them.
The Pivot That Mattered
One of the things we got right was focusing on short quantity orders from the beginning.
In a market where everyone was chasing bulk, we went the opposite direction. Short runs. Fast turnaround. Full customisation — including the self-service 3D design experience — at small quantities.
This was right strategically. But it was also true to who we are. We grew up watching a family business navigate the hard economics of an industry built for large players. We knew what it felt like to be the small one.
ezpac is built by small business people, for small business people.
The Hard Middle
I won't skip this part because I think it matters.
Building ezpac while carrying the weight of 2017 was genuinely difficult. Client payments that came late. Vendors who needed paying now. Debt — some inherited, some operational — that sat on the chest like a stone.
There was a specific moment that tested us most. We took on 20 lakhs in debt to protect a vendor connected to my father's old business — someone whose struggle was impacting our family directly. I took that debt because it was the right thing for the family, even if it wasn't the right thing for the balance sheet.
That's the kind of decision you don't read about in funding announcements.
But we're still here. The business is still growing. And the 3D design studio is still being opened by first-time small business owners who've never been able to afford proper packaging before.
Shark Tank India: What It Was and Wasn't
This February, my brother and I appeared on Shark Tank India.
I'll be honest about what that was and wasn't.
It wasn't a fairy tale. It wasn't the moment everything got solved. The work ahead is still real.
But it was evidence that what we built is real enough to stand in that room and talk about. And the visibility since the episode — faster website sales, more small businesses discovering the design studio for the first time — that's exactly why we went.
Not for validation. For reach. For every small seller who doesn't yet know that they can design their own branded packaging in 3D, order just 10 units, and have it delivered to their door.
What I Know Now That I Didn't Know in 2017
Survival years are not wasted years. Everything we learned while rebuilding after 2017 lives inside ezpac — the industry knowledge, the empathy for small businesses, the stubbornness that keeps you going when the numbers don't look good.
Tear down every wall, not just the obvious one. The MOQ was the obvious problem. But we went further — the 3D self-service design studio, custom sizes, instant process, doorstep delivery. Every barrier a small business faces became something we engineered a door through.
The slow build is real. We didn't raise a round and hire a team. We built customer by customer. Less dramatic. More durable.
The right people change everything. My brother and co-founder carries the same instincts I do. My wife has been the stability that kept us standing when the vision felt impossible. You cannot build alone.
If You're a Small Business Builder Reading This
ezpac.in exists because we refused to accept that great packaging should only be for brands that already made it.
Open our 3D design studio. Design your own packaging — yourself, in minutes, no experience needed. See it exactly as it will look before it's printed. Order as few as 10 units. Get it delivered to your door.
Your brand deserves to look like a brand from day one.
👉 ezpac.in
Paarth Shah is the co-founder of ezpac.in and appeared on Shark Tank India Season 4 in February 2026. He lives in Mumbai with his wife and is still, every single day, building.
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