InkFruit.com – Design your own T-shirt
Kashyap Dalal presented the story of InkFruit.com, at the Startup Saturday event.
InkFruit.com
What is it about?
Inkfruit.com enables the design community, or even amateur designers, to design their own T-shirt designs and submit. Based on user votes on the designs submitted, the best ones are chosen as winners. The designers win prizes, and the designs also become available to inkfruit.com to make into T-shirts and sell via their website.
What more?
The site is really about “design”. The main pitch is to get good designs on T-shirts. All logistics are managed by the company. Printing of T-shirts is done with high quality screen printing or by transfer printing process. This is to ensure good quality and longer life of the printed T-shirt. The business of about 1.5 years old, has reached a healthy run rate of Rs. 2 crores gross merchandise sales annually, and there is significant room for growth, considering the T-shirts market.
New initiatives include affiliate marketing options, selling it via offline stores and also branching into other custom design products.
Competitive pressures do exist with few good, well established offline brands, and other personalized T-shirt offers online.
Other Observations:
Inkfruit is not necessarily printing on the fly, once orders are received. In fact, they print and keep a small lot of each T-shirt design ready. When a product is offered on sale, it is already ready duly printed. The large inventory exposure however, is only in the plain T-shirts.
In recent days, they have had foreign designers also put their designs on the site, and as a consequence of these being featured on the site, some sales of such T-shirts are also trickling in from foreign customers. Retail level orders are shipped from India, to execute these orders, by Inkfruit.
Wisdom Nuggets:
1. As I see the proposed growth paths of offline retail, new products, affiliates, etc., I have a specific question to pose. What is the real business? Are you about T-shirts, about all designer products, about distribution, about online retail, etc.? Based on that, the suitable growth steps need to be taken. If enough thought is not given to this fact, there is a risk of creating a lot of activities, but which do not necessarily add up to cohesive value creation.
2. The e-commerce market in India has not really grown to seriously large numbers. While e-commerce is theoretically assumed to be a lower costing option for retail, it is only so after crossing a certain minimum level of volumes. Until that happens, the economies of purchase are nowhere compared to offline players. And also the additional cost burdens of cross-border shipments (as against in-store local sales) such as shipping costs, taxation like sales tax, octroi, etc. make the proposition not very attractive economically. Designer T-shirts fall into a clear niche segment of business. Even if designer stationery or other similar products are added, these are still not high volume sales products. How does the business scale up in revenues rapidly?
3. Offline business opens up a different challenge. In reality, it is almost a different business. Or of course, its a different channel of distribution – whichever way one sees it. Undoubtedly though, the challenges are of a very different nature. From extending credit, from inventory replinishments, from returns of sales, sharing a healthy commission, etc., there are a set of issues that come up. Doe Inkfruit really want to go that way? And if it does, then that offline sales initiative should be taken with all vigour, and in fact, in that case, the online sales will become trivial compared to the offline one!
4. New products bring a different set of challenges. From the production aspects, to begin with. There is a clear repeatable process of printing T-shirts, and there is, numbers wise, a reasonably predictable market. And also if there is inventory stuck up, if a sale is done periodically, at lower cost, the T-shirts may move off. But say, there is a designer calendar, or a designer pen set, or something like that, even at low cost, it may not move at times. Then, inventory management and dead stocks may open up newer challenges. Put another way, if T-shirts are doing say, business worth 100, would you add 10 new products and take business to 120, or focus on pushing T-shirt sales and take it to 110, if not 120? Also what is the right size when expansion of products should be attempted? When T-shirts have reached a fairly mature market size.
5. There is an opportunity worth exploring, which Inkfruit has just accidentally touched. Which is of delivering the T-shirts to customers outside India. In a designer T-shirt, there is a cost of design. Which in western countries, might equate to a number even higher than the cost of the shirt itself. Indian amateur designers will be cheaper. Further the T-shirts itself come cheap from sources like Tirupur, which are anyway, one of the manufacturing hubs for global supplies. Finally the other overheads of business are also cheaper in India. If these are appreciated and Inkfruit chooses to thrust itself full blast into the international space, it could well generate far higher growth rates than what it gets from Indian market. Yes, the logitics cost and its challenge will need to be factored in. There are ways to work on those. But this could well be a useful and highly productive move for Inkfruit.
In conclusion, while a top line of Rs. 2 crores looks interesting, since it is a semi-trading, semi-manufacturing, plus service (retail + CRM etc.) business, it may not be leaving enough room at the bottom line. To make serious money from the venture, the top line needs to go to at least Rs. 10 crores level or so. That means, selling 5 times the number of T-shirts, on an average, from what they are doing now. How confident is InkFruit of getting there in the next 2-3 years at most? And after doing that also, the business will be Rs. 10 crores, which for a trading or retail business, still looks small. There is a clear need to examine the business model at that base level, and see what they need to do, to expand and grow very rapidly from this point.
oCricket.com – A Social Network for the cricket addicts
Brajeshwar presented his new venture, oCricket.com, at the Startup Saturday event.
oCricket.com
What is it about?
oCricket is supposed to be a Social Network, specifically dedicated to cricket fans. With the typical features of social networks, including friends, sharing, commenting, etc. A genuine Web 2.0 product.
What more?
One of the key features that Brajeshwar showcased was a way to link any media content from anywhere on the net, quickly to one’s account on oCricket. The ease of this linking, and then the content showing up on oCricket, along with the necessary copyright disclaimers, is a neat feature. Using this, the property can get a lot of good images, videos very quickly, once the users start using these features.
Other obervations:
The site is strong on technical aspect. Features appear to be quite rugged and well coded. The site also presents a very professional, international look and feel. The site is hosted on Amazon cloud computing, enabling cost efficiency on hosting costs. As Brajeshwar mentioned, many other useful tools are also bought on a small monthly fee basis, keeping the overall running costs low. At this time, there were no revenue options visible, and Brajeshwar mentioned that several plans were there, but these would be coming up in time, once usage traction is found.
Wisdom Nuggets:
1. It appeared that the entire content was user generated. Which is perfectly fine. But which means that the key input from the site owners is the technology input, which allows the social network to flourish. Then, in reality, there is not a lot of investment done by the team, on the vertical per se. Cricket has been chosen for its popularity, but beyond that, it is incidental. Then, it could very well make sense to quickly scale up the project by creating a whole bunch of similar properties, and port the same features there as well. Be it say, for all sports (oFootball, oTennis, oF1Racing, etc. etc.) to carry the sports theme through, or say, pick India’s biggest engagement verticals, other than cricket, viz. oBollywood and oPolitics. In doing so, there is enough traction that could come, without additional costs, and for a user, there may be multiple interests, and a higher level of engagement, after having acquired him.
2. If this is not done, there needs to be a very serious compelling reason for a user to come to this site, specially for cricket alone. Would one not expect such neat groups to be found on one’s own existing social network, be it Facebook or Orkut or whatever? oCricket will be well served then, to quickly come up with Facebook apps for their offering.
3. There are no apparent entry barriers. Having said that, I buy Brajeshwar’s point on the same. No one has done it before, and they can grab the piece, if there is one. Others will have to fight and catch up, once oCricket gets some critical mass.
4. There is a serious doubt about the copyright factor. At least in my mind. Is it right to pick up content from FlickR or other sites, and just put it up here, and acknowledge the source? I am not sure how other content owners will feel about this?
5. There is also the Google search engine factor, with respect to the same point. Will it not be duplicate content, when it is showing up at the multiple locations? Google does not really like that from a search engine positioning point of view. This could work against oCricket.
6. The revenue model is again a challenge. How long can the site continue to work without revenues? There is a hope to be able to raise venture funding. In today’s investment climate, if it does not happen soon, where does that put oCricket? Without some brand building budgets, growing registered users may become a challenge. And lack of revenue options will put pressures on the finances, I suspect.
7. There is also the challenge of easily differentiating in a congested space. There are tons of cricket sites on the Internet. Is oCricket very different? Will it appeal to users significantly more than others? Why? And does that ‘why’ get answered intuitively when you reach the site?
8. Cricket has not been a vertical to draw a lot of advertising. The demography of a cricket lover is quite diverse, and not a highly targeted one, from an advertiser’s point of view. So will there be money to be made on a cricket vertical? That is a challenge.
Inspiration
UPDATED INSPIRATION: Current date: March 9, 2021!
Below is the original note on the inspiration that I had to start this blog, some 12-13 years back. That was when I was tracking some startups and evaluating them. I had not updated this blog much in recent days. And now, the focus would be very different, in any case. At this time, the purpose of my occasional blog post here, would be to discuss and debate a business strategy or an investment idea, for purpose of interaction with other like-minded people.
Hope you find it to be of interest.
The original inspiration from 12-13 years back is as follows:
Attending a Bar Camp, Startup Saturday and the Entrepreneurship Summit, in the last 3 weeks, took me back to 1997-98 days when we were starting up for the first time, with Homeindia.com, along with few other first-generation dot com entrepreneurs in India.
I can see the same energy now, perhaps only magnified by the changes in the economy over these years, the emergence of India as a country to reckon with, the maturity of the ICT businesses, the far larger familiarity of the technologies for students climbing out of their campuses, and of course, the awareness now, about an ecosystem that can encourage entrepreneurship.
There is another change. Me. With 11 years of hands-on Internet experience, there is a larger “intuitive” feel on the industry, there is beyond the romanticism of the business, a better understanding of business realities, of markets, of revenues and results. As one young participant respectfully pointed out, there is the “gray hair” difference.
This has inspired me to start this new blog. To share my 2 cents worth, on new startups that I see coming up. Based only on information that is in the public domain (or shared by the company in public forums), and not based on any private information that entrepreneurs share with me. With an idea to give some new perspectives. Ultimately the business succeeds because of the entrepreneurs and they need to trust their gut. But “outside” views help sometime. And which is what I strive to provide here. With only one goal in mind: to enable the entrepreneur to SUCCEED!!
The Gray Hair Speaketh 