Sita Maharjan's workshop in Thamel produces about 200 hand-loomed pashminas a month. Until last year, almost all of them sold to walk-in tourists. When tourism collapsed, she needed to ship abroad — and quickly discovered that exporting from Nepal is technically easy but financially painful.
This is the story of how she built a worldwide pashmina business without ever moving production out of Kathmandu.
The three-currency problem
Sita's customers live in three buckets:
- Nepal — pays in NPR via eSewa, Khalti, or COD
- India — pays in INR via Razorpay or UPI
- Rest of world — pays in USD via card (Stripe)
Before Vinoraam, she was trying to manage this through a combination of PayPal (which Nepal merchants can receive but not send), Wise (which works but takes 5 days), and one international card processor whose fees ate 4.5% of every transaction.
Reconciling the three rails at month-end took her bookkeeper a full day. By the third month she had stopped checking which orders had actually been paid and just hoped.
The setup that worked
Vinoraam handles all three currencies natively. Sita's checkout shows the local currency based on the customer's IP — NPR for visitors from Nepal, INR for India, USD for everywhere else. The conversion rates are pulled from a daily fixed rate, so a customer never sees a different price than the one they were quoted.
On her side, every order shows up in her dashboard in NPR equivalent, with the original currency and exchange rate in a tooltip. Her bookkeeper now reconciles in 15 minutes a week instead of a day a month.
The shipping side
Sita ships internationally via DHL (for orders over USD 200) and Nepal Post Air (for everything smaller). She wires both into Vinoraam's shipping zones:
- Nepal — flat NPR 200, free over NPR 5,000
- India — INR 850 (Nepal Post Air)
- US/Europe — USD 35 (DHL Express, 4–7 days)
- Rest of world — quote on request
The "quote on request" tier is important. Some destinations (parts of Africa, South America) have shipping costs that vary wildly week-to-week. Rather than guess, Sita asks the customer to message her on WhatsApp for an exact quote, then she creates a custom order link. About 8% of her orders go through this path, and they have a higher average order value than her standard checkout.
The numbers
Six months after switching to Vinoraam, Sita ships to 14 countries. Her monthly revenue is about 3.2× what it was on her old setup, with the same production output (200 pashminas/month) — the difference is that more of those pashminas are now selling at premium export prices instead of tourist prices.
Her bookkeeper says the month-end close used to take her until midnight on the last day of the month. Now it takes her one afternoon, and she leaves the office on time.
"I'm doing the same thing I did before. I just stopped losing track of the money."
