DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

1. Substantial finance
2. Website—with secure payment gateway and a method allowing the users to upload/choose a design
3. Printing machines/inks
4. Basic t-shirts of various qualities and sizes
5. Courier service including logistics
6. Creative team

How does your business work?
Pring00 is into the customized products business where our customers can select designs and messages to be printed on t-shirts, mugs, canvas, posters, mouse pads etc. The things are required to set-up such a business are:

Arpana Priyadarshini Founder, Pring00.com

A website where people can design their t-shirt and that has regular e-commerce features like shopping cart, credit card transaction facility etc. In-house printing set-up as each t-shirt is unique and screen printing (mass production) is not possible. Good supply chain system/vendor relation for plain t-shirt, printing materials, ink, packaging stuff, shipping etc. And last but not the least, an effective and result-oriented marketing plan.

What present hurdles are there for this business?
There are three big hurdles:

Low penetration of e-commerce and Internet users in India. People are still reluctant to use credit cards online. Lack of awareness about customized merchandising in India.

What marketing methods are adopted?
Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Seminars and ground activation. Newsletters and direct mailers. Online and offline contests. Regular college campus visits.

Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai Founders, Inkfruit

Inkfruit follows the second model where a community chosen design in printed. Its CEO Kashyap Dalal responded to this questionnaire.

What is required to set up a custom t-shirt printing business?
There are two basic things that a business needs in the t-shirts segment. Firstly, a strong differentiated idea. There are enough players in the market and a lot of suppliers who just copy the designs seen on other brands. This approach is very detrimental to developing a strong identity and a sustainable business. What is needed is a sharply-defined theme on which a brand develops. In Inkfruit’s case for example, it is all about being a democratic collection of prints—where our 90,000-strong community of people at Inkfruit.com decide what gets printed in our range. This is novel and not done by any other brand and therefore differentiates Inkfruit from the rest.

Secondly, access to capital. In the initial stages this business does require infusing capital to fund inventory and the processes. Later, supply partners take on this responsibility, but in the early stages the business needs to finance the operations.

What present hurdles are there for this business?
One of the hurdles in this business is that at low volumes it is difficult to find quality vendors who can provide great quality and timely delivery as per commitment. Once a good scale is achieved, then supply can be managed through long-term tie-ups with supply partners.

Another is to understand the nature of the market and adapt with changing trends. A t-shirt is a very personal piece of clothing and it is important that products offered gel with current consumer trends.

What marketing methods are adopted?
In t-shirts as a category, the product itself is the biggest marketeer. If the designs are great and the quality is good, it will start becoming popular.

Inkfruit as an organization has stayed away from any above-the-line marketing campaigns. Awareness about our model has largely grown through word-of-mouth, where people who know about Inkfruit and designers whose designs get printed on Inkfruit, talk about it to their friends. We focus very strongly on keeping our members happy—for example our designers get their name on every t-shirt sold and feel very proud of this. Secondly, we focus very strongly on the quality of our products and ensure a great experience every time. Thirdly, we keep innovating and launch new products—like recently we launched color changing t-shirts, which change color when a person walks in the sun. Together all of these things create positive word-of-mouth for a business in this space.

What is required to set-up such business?
A little money and a lot of passion. To be successful however, you’ll need to have ‘talent’ too. You can start with as little as Rs.20,000,….but Rs.1-2 Lacs is ideal.

What marketing methods are adopted?
For Tantra, we did a ‘bottom up’ approach, i.e. MBOs to Malls to EBOs. However,
this need not be the case for every budding entrepreneur.