Two 25 yr old girls trying to build a product, & the part nobody warned us about doing it as a woman

There are two of us, both 25, both engineers from IIT Roorkee, one from chemical & other electrical engineering.
The story started when we moved to Bengaluru and in 2 years our hairs were ruined by its hard water. When we found this needs a chemical solution and not the plumbing one, we decided to build a product of our own.
Wanted to share a specific part of our journey which we did not anticipate as well when we started.

If any D2C founder is reading this, they might relate to us but building a physical thing means you need a vendor for literally everything.
The product we could figure out, we're engineers, thats the part we knew. But everything around it, the bottle, its cap, a tiny shrink wrap, the label, box, the tiny card inside, and its printing and what not. Both of us have no business background, startups in IITs were mostly tech related so this us essentially our first time dealing with all of this as 25yr olds 😭😭

As we wanted the best in everything, we never settled with one, it was like 5 or 6 for each, and you have to actually go there in person, check the quality yourself, sit and negotiate and that too in shady lanes of Delhi NCR [sorry, don't want to hurt anybody's sentiment but this is true😭]

Coming back, so most of this past year was just the two of us going to these places. And honestly I did not expect how much it would hurt being a girl doing this in those lanes.
People casually took us lightly, denied talking, there tone used to change instantly knowing we were the founders. Some were polite, but some were just rude in hurtful ways and we really couldn't do anything about it than just walk away to next 😭
There were days we walked out, sat in the car and just didn't say anything for a while. Then went home and did the whole thing again the next day.
Even in between the cycles we had to change vendors because they just didn't listen to us and kept delaying things, because they thought, what we could do to them. Nothing !!

There was one time, I sent location to my friend stating if I dont return call for 10 mins, call the police. We did not realise at that moment...... how much risk we just in the shady lanes. But god's grace was with us finally, after so much, we were able to launch and succeed. We are now selling for months and honestly its going good as we got the product right ❤️❤️

I want to share this now, as it did took a toll on us, and I want to share it as well because no one at start of my journey told me about all of this. We figured it out, maybe thats how things actually play out. But in all this, both us were each other's strength.
To all the women founders, stay strong, you gonna make it one day ❤️❤️

Anyways would love to hear from the women here if you've built something or dealt with vendors, factories, those industrial areas.

I personally thing we don't talk about this as much it needs to be discussed !!