The Paintcollar Storyline — highlighting entrepreneurial lessons of 2016

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Paintcollar is a startup with a mission to enable artists and creators to monetise their content through forms that their online audiences are actually consuming — designer merchandise and lifestyle products. It was launched in September 2014 by four engineering graduates — Amogh Vaishampayan and Akash Arun from NIT Trichy and Deepak Yadav and Shantanu Mahajan from VNIT Nagpur. Paintcollar's artists constitute illustrators, graphic designers, YouTubers, bands, poets, movie studios, and a wide range of creative individuals and communities.

Learnings from 2016 and key achievements:

Amogh told YourStory, “2016 was a period of immense growth and learning for us. We were able to grow our artist community, achieve a product/market fit, and get amazing market validation for our concept. One major learning was that in e-commerce, whoever offers the best customer service experience stands to win the game. We also were able to minimise our costs of customer and artist acquisition through organic network effects.”

He further added, “We also raised an angel round of funding. In 2016, we pioneered Paintcollar Plug N' Play — an A–Z white-label solution that enables anyone to set up a merchandising store on their own website without any inventory or upfront costs while Paintcollar handles all technology and product fulfilment. The clients market to their audiences themselves while Paintcollar earns on every product sold, effectively making this B2B2C e-commerce with zero cost of customer acquisition.”

“A new user interface was developed after a long period of intense research and user testing. We also added new products to our range and created exclusive merchandise for the movie Shivaay.”

Target for 2017

In 2017, the company is looking to expand the team and also scale the Plug N' Play merchandising solution to include a diverse set of creators from all over the world. They want to add 20,000 new contributing artists to the Paintcollar community and are looking forward to adding new products and introducing several new features.

Paintcollar storyline

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