The days of the Maharajas may be long gone, but Kashyap Dalal, 28, likes to be regarded as one. Or so his business card tells us. And it’s no small coincidence that his partner in business, Navneet Rai, goes with the title Nawab.
“We started off very small, with just about ten of us. So we thought of keeping nicknames for such a small team to stand out” says Dalal, founder of the portal inkfruit.com, on why they chose to do away with the typical designations.
Dalal was content with making product plan, sales strategy and organising customer meets at Hindustan Unilever during the day and spending the evenings reading or partying until he spotted an opportunity in the growing popularity of online communities such as Orkut and Facebook.
“Some of my seniors, well placed in US-based firms, had to return during the dotcom bust. But I had always thought that the internet, which was the root of all miseries then, best suited entrepreneurs who didn’t have pots of money to start a venture with. You had to engage the communities and harness the power in them,” says Dalal, an alumnus of IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Lucknow.
He thought of getting T-shirts designed by designers online and selecting the top 10 or 20 most creative designs for production.
In 2007, Dalal put in Rs 2 lakh, the bulk of his savings from the one-and-half year stint at HUL. His partner Rai chipped in equal amount. A couple of family friends and relatives contributed to take the corpus to Rs 10 lakh in 2007.
Inkfruit had started.But why would someone be drawn to the portal to be able to design?“There are quite a few incentives. Designers get a channel to showcase their talents and get rewarded for their work,” says Dalal. There are cash prizes for designs adjudged first, second and third, and the designer’s name gets printed along with his or her design. All the firm does is select some of the most creatively thought out designs as per online popularity, get some manufacturing vendors to make them and sells them to retail houses and also online.
The team now sells about 12,000 T-shirts a month at Rs 350-700 apiece. The business idea is catching on, says Dalal. Not for nothing could inkfruit.com raise about Rs 60 lakh from angel investor Pinstorm in 2008.
Expansion had to follow. From a 600 sq ft area workspace in a Mumbai suburb with 10 employees in 2007, inkfruit.com has grown to over 2,000 sq ft and 25 employees. It broke even in February this year and earns a gross margin of 45%. The stage is now set for a foray into theme-based designs.
“Recently, we designed T-shirts on the theme of beer and music, sponsored by Kingfisher Airlines. It was a grand success. We earned Rs 10 lakh in one month, which included sponsor revenue and those from selling about 2000 T-shirts,” says Dalal.
In fact, inkfruit.com has already bagged ten theme-based contracts, to be executed over next three months. “There is a lot to do. Contracts are pouring in. But we are not in a hurry. We will take up only as much as we can deliver,” says Dalal.
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