Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Inkfruit.com: The Social Design Edge

Launched as Gnome by IIT Bombay alumni Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai in December 2007, as a t-shirt selling site challenging its users with design contests from time-to-time. Inkfruit has not diluted its focus in the last 3 years, and has yet managed to grow. There are few parallels in the industry.

But the central idea behind Inkfruit is not just a t-shirt store, or even a customized one at that. It is involved in buying and co-creation. It has a network of artists and designers, who upload their designs on the website and users vote for the designs. If a particular design has received maximum rating, it gets the tag of Inkfruit Hall of Fame. The design is printed and put on sale. Its annual design contest and occasional contests have thousands of fan following.

Besides selecting from t-shirts, buyers can also try other products like mugs, posters, and calendars.

Because of its customized approach, it competes with other similar sites such as Myntra, which is bigger. But Inkfruit appeals to a loyal set of customers, and also the new discerning buyers. It is positioned as not just a portal for t-shirts, but also a social media site for the designers and t-shirt lovers.

While the company raised a round of angel investment, it has to raise further funds to create marketing impact, especially as the value of design is finally being recognized in India.

Magazinemall.in: The Virtual Stand

Magazinemall.in managed to get into our list primarily because of its user experience score, though its higher traction in terms of users and pageviews in comparison to direct competitor indiamags.com also helped. The magazine subscription site, founded by Sandeep Kumar and mentored by media and communications professional Jay Vikram Bakshi, has a very simple proposition: Providing online subscription of magazines at one place.

In less than 1 year, the company has been able to convince the publishers and has already entered into agreements with more than 37 publishing groups covering more than 200 publication titles across various categories. The warehouse and logistics hub is located at its corporate office in Gurgaon.

While the model is extremely simple and it is easy to convince publishers to try out yet another channel, there is little extra value for the subscribers as it does not offer anything other than an aggregated platform. Not many individual subscribers subscribe to more than 5 or 6 magazines. It is not too difficult to subscribe to them in the publishers website. The discount is also not very high, unlike most online retailers who primarily thrive on the discounted sales. Also, unlike other products, fulfillment is not a one-time activity and hence, the company cannot ensure that the quality will be maintained.

To grow, the company needs to find revenue streams other than commissions from publishers as even today, reaching critical mass on the online channel is difficult. But, with the marketing brains and social media experience of both CEO Kumar and mentor Bakshi, the company is still one to watch out for.

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10