Wear Your Opinion (WYO) - T-shirts that Capture Urban India's Pet Peeves
When Rajveen Khandelwal the founder of “Wear Your Opinion” decided to move to India from the US and start his own venture he was not looking at making Tshirts at all. After lot of research he had narrowed down to the idea of starting an India focused News and Opinion site where knowledgeable and credible contributors anchor and build their digital brands on an online platform. He was figuring out potential revenue models besides online advertisements and that is when it occurred to him why not "Wear our Opinion" (WYO)? i.e. make Tees that reflect current events, Indian culture,
Religions etc., broadly anything under the Indian Urbane theme.This he reasoned would go well with the News platform and provide revenue to an expected low profit digital news agency. The News platform required a lot of technical resources and was complex in nature. He thus decided to start off with Wear Your Opinion and figure out things as they progress. Since then WYO has been his prime focus.
The Tshirts are based on satire and parody of the finest sort, that which is aimed at ourselves. Wear Your Opinion WYO is also about great T-shirt designs created in-house as well as contributed by designers across India. They invite designers to look at our society, culture, system and pin point things that ridicule, trouble and annoy us. They believe that they must “Broadly bring out the Indianess in us. We then bring those societal things onto nice tees in the form of beautifully executed artwork with a message.“
They also profess to making a good wearable product that provides an opportunity for talented artists to make some money. Divesh Mehta from Team WYO says “These Tees are not only great in quality but also wonderfully cut and stitched. We then release one original and exclusive design every week at a lower price of 399/- and after a week this design is moved into our archive where it is available for higher price i.e. 449/-. Every Design has a very witty writeup with complete credits to the designer. Designers can participate at WYO.in by submitting designs or ideas. For every Design that is selected. WYO.in pays a flat INR 5000/-. Adding to that a royalty of 5% for over 300 Tees sold.”
“We invite designers to submit designs to us. We have an advisory designer panel that consists of senior artists from advertisement and entertainment world. These designers not only help us with in-house creation but also review the artwork that is submitted by other artists. We are also on constant search of artists who see things differently and we approach them with our ideas and concepts.”
WYO has been in operation since August 2011. They may be primarily focused on the online segment but can also be found in niche boutiques that sell less ordinary stuff.
It is a logical deduction that College students, young working professionals, primarily the age group 18-30 would be their target audience. However they
believe that “Tees are something that goes well with all age group as long as they can relate to the concept.”Their future plans are focused on expanding their range of products. They stated “We are expanding our designs on other media for ex. bags, coasters, mugs etc. In addition to promoting our own platform WYO.in, we are looking forward to tie up with popular online e- commerce sites. We have identified 15 such partners and are already working with them. We will also retail offline aggressively and target to add stores across the country by the end of the year. We definitely look to partner with major organized retail players in near future.”
Though their concepts are nothing new to a market which has several similar ventures like "Inkfruit" or "Pringoo", the quality of their products and brand image is eventually what will determine their fate. To this the folks at WYO replied" We at WYO.in know that we have chosen to build a brand that is “SOCIAL” in real terms. A brand that would help consumer to communicate what she/he – really is, thinks or believes. By “social” we mean connecting
every Indian to his culture, roots, society and his country – the good, the bad, the ugly and definitely the funny side and by “social” we also intend to inspire the youth to make a difference in various walks of life by setting an example; we work with an NGO which benefits on every sale made through our website."
See how their products stack up against the competition at WYO