Dezains : Zinging it up with caricatures
Dezains prints hand-made caricatures on mugs and tees from the photos you provideLazing in his chair at a job after his engineering, living the life of a sinecure, Ankit was toying with the idea of starting up. As is usually the case, Ankit and his group had a zillion b-plans but thanks to the size of the group, each idea was repressed. Nevertheless, while at his job, Ankit setup a website for selling printed tee shirts but he soon realized that these kind of websites are present at a dime a dozen and would be hard to capitalize.
He didn’t have to look far for something unique as his brother Amrit, the creative guy, was seeing huge traffic for his caricature making service (free at that point). Taking the cue, armored with his business acumen, Ankit took over from where Amrit left it. This was how Dezains took birth. The stage was set but Dezains needed someone to orchestrate the show. Step in Prannoy. Having worked in Bangalore for a year, Prannoy shifted base to Mumbai to get the show going.
They invested a lot of time in designing the layout of the website and building the website in-house. Ankit was responsible for building the website while Prannoy set in place the processes. Dezains officially launched on the 23rd of August, 2011 and with a little buzz created pre-launch, Dezains saw 1600 visitors on the first day. They have been growing steadily ever since and process 25-30 orders each day now. Having served over 3000 customers by now, Dezains employs 3 fulltime and 6 part-time caricature artists.
All the caricatures are hand drawn using a tablet so that it directly comes in a digital format which saves a lot of time over the traditional methods. Dezains has a huge fan base in the online space with more than 50,000 fans on the Facebook page. They have also teamed up with seal sites like Groupon and Anapdeal to accelerate sales apart from running google and facebook ads.
In an interesting marketing campaign, Dezains allowed you to send a free gift card on New Year’s day to the person you wanted to by entering his details on the website. Offline, Dezains has sponsored a few college fests which goes a long way in creating a loyal customer base in the college crowd as this is the audience most likely to buy caricature products.
In what has been a very interesting journey till now, we’d sure be looking forward for more from the Dezain stable. In a recent post, we had a look at Graphicurry, who’re also doing interesting things in the graphics arena.
- Jubin Mehta
