Introduction: Inkfruit was the latest addition to the already buzzing pool of online portals for customised T-shirt and other merchandise printing.
History: Formed by Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai in December 2007. Kashyap and Navneet are former batchmates from the 2002 IITB batch.
What do they do? – They get your designs and slogans printed on T-shirts and other merchandise like caps, mugs, posters etc. Inkfruit focuses primarily on T-shirts.
How do they do? – They get designs online from its users, and get them printed through vendors. The T-shirts are then sold online and through stores. The business is divided almost 50-50 between the online and offline channels. One quarter of the online business comes from overseas.
Who else does this? – There are a lot of companies which have been around for quite some time now, and have been doing pretty good business. A few to name are Myntra, Dilsebol, Pringoo, Xtees, etc.
How is Inkfruit different? – Inkfruit has the idea of being the democratic company which has all its designs created and voted by its users. Other companies do not have this level of customization. The older players allow you to customize only to the level of your name or some slogan being printed. Also, collection of Inkfruit designs was good as compared to others.
Revenue: With almost 5000 T-shirts being sold every month, and an average price of Rs. 220 per shirt, the net revenue comes to about Rs. 11,00,000 per month. Thats pretty good! They are planning to push up the sales to almost 15000 T-shirts by the end of FY 2009-10. They are also planning to foray into collared T-shirt printing.
Thumbs up for Inkfruit:
- Collection of designs is really good. The idea of being democratic has really clicked, and now Inkfruit probably has one of the best collection amongst all the players in this domain.
- Working equally hard on the offline front really highlights their deep understanding of the Indian market and mentality.
- T-shirt and printing quality is good.
Thumbs down for Inkfruit:
- I faced some login issues. Their login popup was not working properly on Google Chrome. Next thing, it does not allow me to login with my credentials even after I verified my login details from the email they sent.
- Femme collection was very small. Probably they are missing out on a large section of the customers.
- Total dependency on democratic designers. They might run out of good designs if the outsourced designers do not come up with good designs regularly. Microreviews recommends that they should hire some full time designers, given that they are looking to treble their sales in the next six months.
Overall Rating: 8/10
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