Pitching for a designer ecosystem - Kunal Arora, Erizmo

Design plays a prominent role in all aspects of a business, be it branding, marketing, or communicating the message to the consumers. We all recognize the famous logo of an apple with a bite out of it, but how many of us really know Rob Janoff, the designer himself?

We got in conversation with Kunal Arora, a final-year student of B.Pharm. of Kurukshetra University, who has started www.erizmo.com, where they are making an effort to create a designer ecosystem in India. Kunal says, “There are millions of designers and artists around the world. Their art is just amazing but there isn't a solid way of earning via those designs. Generally these artists earn either by giving their designs to advertisers or working as a freelancer or doing a regular job with some established design firm”.

Kunal believes that by doing these, designer’s real identity is lost. To really add more value for their creations, they partner with the designers and artists to get the rights of their designs in return on a commission, which also enables them to earn through their portal. Here, Kunal takes on a few questions from StudentStory.

What really made you start Erizmo?Art is important in our society, but generally in most of the middle-class families, they insist their children become engineers or doctors. No one tells them to become designers, but if you see all the products today, design is important in everything.

How does Erizmo work?

After working on 2-3 business models in the beginning, and having talks with some business gurus, we finalized that we will be collaborating with designers to publish their designs on our products. We pay commission on every sale. We have a back-end where designers can just log in and check out the sales for proper calculations of the commission.

What were your initial challenges?

My initial challenges were to build a portal, to learn from scratch to build the site myself in four months and then to take this idea out there in the market, as it was a very new concept for the designers.

So how was the response from the market?

The market response has been good so far. We are selling both online and offline. So far, we have sold more than 10,000 products. Recently, we launched ‘Breaking Bad’ collections, which sold more than a 100 posters in the first few days.

Based on good sales traction of ‘Breaking Bad’ collections, we increased the commission rate by 10% for the designer.

Any message for student entrepreneurs?

It doesn’t matter who you are. Just start up as soon as your heart tells you, because in the end it knows where it is leading you.

You can reach Kunal Arora at [email protected]