“Hi! My name is Sainyam Khanna and my start-up is called Custprint!” Thanks to Alok, I happened to gain the courage of asking the first question at TheRodinhoods Gurgaon Open House! Throughout the meet I could feel tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm flowing through the room and absolutely loved attending my first ever start-up meet. I hope to attend many more in the coming future thanks to TheRodinhoods!!
I am glad to share with Rodinhooders my experience of successfully ideating, preparing and delivering a start-up at the age of 20. So here we go!
“Customization” and the Indian E commerce:
Even if you took the time to find a reliable provider and to customize something, did the product look like something your local tailor could have done a better job at? Did the printing look like something out of an 80’s movie? Well I am here to introduce to you Custprint, where we take customization to a new level.
How it all started:
It all began from when I used to come down to Delhi for vacations from my boarding school in Mussoorie. Whenever I was back, dad took me to office every day. I thought back then that he was so jealous that he just couldn’t stand the sight of me all tucked in my bed as he heads to office but now I realize there was a lot more to that. Well after being dragged into office it was pretty natural for me to start helping out in the family business which, started by my father in 1975 was one of the first garment manufacturing and printing businesses in Delhi.
At first everything was, yep you guessed it… BORING!! To get me started, dad started handing off some clients to me. When I started taking orders, that’s when the frustration of running a business hit me. Now I knew why dad was stressed almost all the time. Terrible suppliers, nightmare logistics, bad warehousing, office politics, blue collar workforce, frustrating middlemen and satanic export houses for 2 months!!!!! Not something I would like to call a school vacation. Nonetheless, it was a sheer learning experience. When it did end, I knew what our family business was all about. To put it to you simply, here’s an example:
Suppose Kolkata Knight Riders teams up with a major brand label to manufacture their jerseys for the upcoming IPL. Brands, usually follow a sourcing-storage-distribution model working off inventory in their warehouses. Well in KKR’s case for example, they require personalized jerseys with their logo, names, printing, and texture and so on and so forth. And thus during my second vacation, I found out from my dad that in 2011 we had printed KKR fan jerseys! Can you believe it? KKR fan jerseys! Like that thing you end up buying in a showroom? We had made it and the quality was spot on!
Now if I was a normal teenager I would have asked dad, “Dad, did you save me one?”, but unfortunately I did not. Sometime later, I saw one of my close friends wearing that same jersey and that’s when the “business keeda” started bothering me. I simply thought that this jersey is something we probably made, where we manufactured a product and sold it back to a major brand who in turn sold it back to my friend for 5-6 times the price by just slapping on a label and display it in a showroom!! I mean seriously?!
School passed and I graduated out on 2013, came back to Delhi and started college. A lot had changed since those vacations back in 2011, but that “business keeda” kept bothering me day in and day out. One fine day I hit an epiphany by asking myself a question:
Why can’t a customer connect directly with the manufacturer when it comes to customization?
So that’s when the idea of Custprint hit me! First year of college, I started working around the hours ideating, hiring, purchasing, coding, meeting, screaming, crying and frying my brains out to create something out of the box which will truly kill that keeda once and for all!
After working for 1 year and 2 months and at 20 years old, I registered Custprint as a sole proprietorship under my father’s manufacturing firm!
The website:
Our website breaks the gap of shopping online and static products! I didn’t want to ideate a typical ecommerce website which ran on a predictability model where I would predict what designs or products the consumer wanted to buy and stock at my end, rather taking advantage of manufacturing I wanted to give customer the choice to design something from scratch! We were able to do this by introducing the Create it tool!
So what is Create it? : Create it is the next big step in online customization! Remember how you used to play with MS Paint as a kid? Well this is exactly the same, with a little bit of additional features.
What makes Custprint so different?
- In house manufacturing: All products ordered are manufactured, printed and packaged by us. With our manufacturing unit spread over 3000 sq. feet, we own operate and package all products ordered by you. Because of near 40 years of garment manufacturing and customization experience, Custprint employs the latest printing and customization technologies to give to you a finished product which is worth the price.
- Single piece customized products: Custprint gives you the option to customize and order just one piece of garment for yourself or loved ones.
- Truly customized pricing: Custprint’s create-it tool offers you attractive pricing which adjusts automatically with your quantity and customization area! To put it simply, the bigger the print, the higher the price and the more the quantity the lower the price.
- Extremely fast shipping: We ship orders up to 10 pcs in 5 business days!
- Increasing catalogue: Well we manufacture, of course we can do it! We’re adding new items to our catalogue every day!
You all can start playing with Create it here!
You can connect with us on Facebook
Twitter @Custprint
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.”
Joel A. Barker