Paintcollar: Not just another e-commerce startup

Art patronage is intrinsically entrenched in Indian culture. In ancient times, kings and landlords would take talented artists under their patronage and they, in return, would dedicate their masterpieces to them. This was a system that had nurtured hundreds and thousands of artisans and produced priceless works of art. The consequence is a reverentially enriched culture.

Fast forward to modern times. Indian artists may be auctioning their paintings for millions at the word market, but the non-elite can identify little with that. To satisfy yearnings of the masses, a plethora of e-commerce websites offering easily replicable owl prints and fluorescent quirks have sprung up in ready response and promise to deck up your home and hearth in colours of your personality. But what about art, what about soul, what about the bright vibrant ecosystem of artists and creative that is essential for a rich and thriving community? Enter Paintcollar, a brand new startup by five newbie engineers who want to empower the artists as much as they want to enable the regular person to own original beautiful and affordable art.

Paintcollar is a startup which aims to change the way people shop for apparel and merchandise online by connecting them with designers and artists. It launched on September 12^th 2014 at Bangalore Comic Con. On paintcollar.com, artists and designers can create merchandise with their art on it, set their own profit margins and sell it online. When a customer buys the product, they manufacture it and deliver while the artist gets paid the profit margin he had set. Paintcollar had started off with four products – poster prints, canvas prints, laptop skins and T-shirts and are working on adding new products, like mobile cases and more, to their repertoire soon.

How does Paintcollar work?

Artists create merchandise with their artwork on it using our product design tool. It is as simple as uploading their art onto our product templates. For every product we quote a base price. Over this artists can add their own profit margin. The retail price will be a sum of the base price and artist’s margin. The base price covers all our services. When a customer buys a product, Paintcollar manufactures and delivers it while the artist gets paid the margin he had set. At the end of every month, we credit artists’ accounts with their earnings. Artists get an email every time someone buys their products and can also keep a track of their sales history on the website.

What sparked the idea for this initiative?

The thought of starting up arose when five young engineering graduates wanted to do something different. We initially wanted to start an e-commerce merchandise store but quickly realised that there were already too many companies doing exactly the same thing. Then we hit upon the idea of sourcing our designs from artists all over the country. We then realised that there was no platform that allowed artists to sell merchandise directly to the public. Existing companies who had ventured into this area had a lot of friction in their business model like achieving sales goals and lack of a strong product design tool. Finally, after several revisions we developed a clear objective which was to solve all the problems with current e-commerce merchandise companies by creating an open marketplace for artists to share their creativity and earn while offering customers refreshing new designs on a variety of products. To make this even better and appealing, we decided to integrate a social experience in the marketplace. We realised that our product would have to be developed from scratch and what we were aiming for couldn’t really be done using existing website tools and templates.

How inspired is Paintcollar by global and Indian platforms like Etsy and ItsHandMade?

Etsy and ItsHandMade sell hand crafted products listed by users and do not manufacture their own. While they are ideal for selling hand crafted products, artists and designers find it hard to manufacture merchandise like T-shirts and posters. Our revenue models are also different. That being said, we definitely had a lot to learn from companies like Etsy when we were doing our market research. It helped us to identify features that our users would appreciate and to develop new ones that would make the Paintcollar experience even better. That’s when we decided to introduce a social experience in the marketplace. In the coming weeks, users will be able to follow each other, see a feed of their favourite artists’ work on their profiles and get notifications whenever someone buys or appreciates one of their designs. We’re also going to introduce analytics soon so that artists can keep a track of user data associated with their profile and improve their sales strategy.

What is the best part about having your startup centred on artists and other creative people? What is the downside?

The one fact about Paintcollar that creative folk are appreciating the most is that finally they have the power to sell their work while retaining complete creative and financial control over it. All other websites which accept designs from artists either pay them a small one-time fee and then take away the copyright, or require them to meet sales goals in limited time in order to get their products manufactured. Most importantly, artists can use Paintcollar services for free! We don’t charge a penny for selling on Paintcollar. Another great thing is that as more artists signup and upload new work, the choice given to customers keeps increasing. Our catalogue is rapidly expanding every day!

Since our concept is completely new, artists sometimes initially think of us as just another website that wants to make money off their art. But once we explain the concept to them, the response is always fantastic. None of them expect that something as simple, unique and Indian as Paintcollar can fulfil their needs. We’ve been very successful in turning that initial skepticism into joy.

Tell us about your team?

Paintcollar has 5 co-founders. All of us are 2013 engineering graduates, 3 from NIT Trichy and 2 from VNIT Nagpur. Four of us were working in the same company in Mumbai after graduation and the drudgery of corporate life led us to think about starting up. After pitching our idea to another friend, he joined in as the 5^th co-founder.

Currently we have a team that includes a creative head, front end engineer and interns.

What are your thoughts on being a part of the ecommerce game in India at this interesting juncture in the market? Do you think the relatively abstract concept of Paintcollar makes it easier or harder for you to compete with the established giants?

The best part would be that we are able to bring something refreshing to the market. Artists have several incentives to choose Paintcollar as a platform for their creativity. They get mass recognition for their work and get to decide their own price. They also get to retain all copyright over their work.

We definitely believe that in the coming months we will get significant traction in the merchandise market. Paintcollar showcases original and eye catching art which stands out above the countless clichéd designs that have swarmed the market. With the number of designs increasing every day and a single design available on a variety of products, customers have more choice than ever. Moreover, artists promote their own products as well as they get paid for every sale. This greatly increases our online reach.

We have already created a buzz in the Indian heavy metal music scene when two iconic heavy metal bands from Mumbai released their merchandise on Paintcollar. Fans from all over India were excited to have merchandise of their favourite bands delivered to their doorstep. This is an area we plan on exploring more since there are several bands in India making excellent music and fans are ready to support them by buying their merchandise. After all, music is also art, isn’t it?

What has been the challenges in setting up and running Paintcollar? How did you deal with them?

The greatest challenge for us was probably market research and product development. It involved months of study about the pain points in the current online merchandise market and then developing a product to tackle the problems we had identified. We have developed our website in house since we are not just another ordinary e-commerce store and we can confidently say we have the best design tool and user interface among all merchandise websites. One key challenge we had to tackle was “print on demand”. Since hundreds of artists have created designs on Paintcollar and with new uploads every day, we do not keep an inventory of every product. Instead, we manufacture immediately once we get an order and ship to the customer.

Since we’re all engineering graduates who knew nothing about entrepreneurship when we started out, learning the ropes was a bigger challenge than expected. But it was an amazing experience since we learned from our mistakes.

What has the rate of progress been like? Have you achieved any of your initial goals?

In one month of operations we have over 300 designs for sale already. This figure is projected to grow exponentially in the coming months as we reach new audiences. We’ve also generated significant revenue since our mid-September launch. We always wanted to sell merchandise of rock and metal bands, since we’re fans of those genres and there is a great demand for them. Two iconic bands from Mumbai are currently selling their T-shirts on our platform and we are in talks with several more.

We’ve learnt many lessons in almost every field, from marketing to technology. No matter how advanced your product is, if it is unappealing or not easy to use, people will not adopt it. Since we’re creating a new product for our business model, we are as much a tech company as a merchandising company. Building user friendly technology is at the core of Paintcollar’s philosophy. We have a human-centric approach to our product development, where the ease of use and adaptability of the product is paramount.

Any success stories you would like to share?

We launched Paintcollar at Bangalore Comic Con on September 12^th 2014. We gave a live demo of our product on the Comic Con main stage, which resulted in several sign ups within the first three days. Several of our customers have told us that they loved the idea of Paintcollar and that our merchandise was in fact, the best they had bought so far. One fan even remarked that the band T-shirt that he bought was of better quality than several international band T-shirts he owned. Recently our CEO went to attend a rock concert in Mumbai and saw several people in the audience wearing Paintcollar T-shirts. That was a big moment of pride for us as well as for the artists who had designed those T-shirts.

How is Paintcollar funded?

Thus far Paintcollar is a completely bootstrapped startup. We are at the stage when we need resources and a larger team in order to rapidly scale up. We are currently looking for Series A funding and have a complete business plan ready.

What does the future look like for Paintcollar?

Paintcollar’s future looks extremely exciting. We are currently looking for Series A funding. This will help us to work towards making Paintcollar the leading merchandise company in the Indian market. We also plan to enter brick and mortar retail and build the Paintcollar brand. Along with this, several new additions to the website are coming up. We are introducing even more products for artists to splash their colours on. An important milestone is introducing analytics, notifications and a newsfeed for all our users. This will help them keep up to date with the sale of their work and improve on their own marketing strategies. Currently, we are working on a large marketing campaign. We are building a slightly unconventional campaign that highlights our tag line of “Connecting art with lifestyle” through street art, graffiti and music merchandise.

Paintcollar also has a B2B business model by which we help brands to sell their merchandise on their own website. We will provide them with our design tool and shop interface integrated into their own website. With this brands can create and sell to their users from their website while the backend is completely powered by Paintcollar. This B2B model is set to launch soon and is expected to generate large revenue. We plan on approaching several prominent brands and companies with this model. Moreover, we also undertake bulk orders for companies, brands, events, etc.

Check out Paintcollar here