As we were melting away
A love letter to Delhi summers. And to the fifteen brave souls who showed up anyway.
Delhi in May doesn't knock. It just walks in, pulls up a chair, and turns every room into a slow-cooking experiment. Temperatures outside are somewhere between "hot" and "the sun has made this personal."
Most offices deal with this by turning on the air conditioning and pretending the world outside doesn't exist. We, at STRUTT, have chosen a different path. Not entirely by choice — more by the collective decision of every compressor in the building to quietly resign and pursue other interests.
Here's the setup. Our new office is an architectural marvel — a feat of thermal engineering so precise, it is absolutely, genuinely perfect for winters. The production floor on the second floor sits snugly between buildings on three sides: sheltered, cosy, the kind of place you'd want to be in December while sipping chai and watching the fog roll in.
In May, however, that same design operates as a wood-fired oven. A generous, all-day, fully committed wood-fired oven with absolutely no off switch.
"Above the production floor sits the third floor — fully open on all sides, with a terrace on top that collects the day's heat and lovingly radiates it back down. This is where the dreamers, the doers, the schemers and the believers work. Fifteen of us. Frying quietly. Together."
By 2 PM every afternoon, the office starts feeling less like a workspace and more like survival training.
The compressors have unofficially resigned.
The ACs have stopped believing in themselves.
And the fans?
They’re simply pushing hot air around equally so nobody feels left out.
The ACs tried. They put up a fight, God bless them. But somewhere between the new building, the rising mercury, and what we can only assume was a strongly worded letter from the compressor union, they gave up. One by one. Peacefully. Like soldiers laying down arms and walking into the sunset.
So here we are. Fifteen people — the stitchers and the strategists, the samplers and the storytellers, the ones who pack the orders and the ones who dream up the next ones — all in one glorious open-plan oven, doing what we do every single day.
Productivity is now measured in sweat equity. The morning huddle happens early, before the sun clears the neighboring rooftops and decides we haven't earned enough character yet. Water bottles — the STRUTT ones, naturally — are working harder than anything else in the building. By 3pm, someone always jokes that we should just launch a line of heat-proof workwear. Nobody laughs. Mostly because it would sell.
And yet — somehow, stubbornly, beautifully — the work doesn't stop.
"Orders go out. New designs get debated. The team chat stays unreasonably chaotic. Our commitment to every Strutter out there is, as it turns out, completely heat-resistant. Flame-proof, even."
We've lost some calories, certainly. The building is doing more for our collective fitness than any gym membership ever could. But what we haven't lost — not one degree of it — is the energy that makes this place what it is.
The temperatures may be soaring. The compressors may be on sabbatical. But fifteen people still walked in this morning, pulled out their chairs, and got to work on something they believe in.
#STRUTT #StartupLife #DelhiSummer #BehindTheScenes #BuildingInIndia #TeamCulture
