CraftsVilla.com brings cultural versatility online

The packaging and marketing Indian handicraft to the urban double income household is what 32-year-old Monica Gupta’s CraftsVilla.com attempts to do. A former accountant, Monica gave up her job in the US to move to India five years ago to work with NGOs in Ahmedabad and Kutch.

She decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge in January 2011 with an initial capital of Rs 10 lakh. Having received first round of funding from Nexus Venture partners and Life Speed venture Partners, CraftsVilla.com is today India's largest online portal for handicraft with 60,000 plus products live and a target to reach one million products over the next few months. “CraftsVilla.com is actually a market place to find unique Indian handmade organic and natural products. We have all the products that you can think of in India available. We have most of them online. CraftsVilla.com goes to sellers and explains them the concept of getting their own shop made online. It is their brand, their pricing, their shop. We even give them the access to the changes that they can do. So it is more like we help them build their own shop on CraftsVilla.com, market it to the right consumer base that we have,” explained Monica. This way CraftsVilla.com connects the sellers to the consumers directly. Here sellers benefit because they get the right price of the product. It is all fully paid and also pre-paid orders so they do not have to worry about any bad debts or defaults. “They know cash is already there with them. Consumers also get the benefit of getting the products directly from manufacturers so they get at a much lower price. They do not have to give any higher margins to all the 3-4 intermediaries that are normally given in handicraft sector,” said the young entrepreneur. Creating a virtual market place for handicrafts is not where Monica’s ambitions end. She hopes to set up 20 CraftsVilla studios across India to have artisans aligned with market needs. So Monica and team intend to hand hold artisans through content writing, uploading as well as shipping. CraftsVilla.com charges a commission of 15-20% on every item sold but artisans do not seem to mind as the middleman has been done away with. “I thought of selling online but I searched for a few sites where I can sell; I like the idea of CraftsVilla. It gave me a platform to sell my products. They promote our products through Facebook and emails. The main challenge is procuring the raw materials because they are a bit expensive and I have to source it from different places. I even have to source items from outside India,” said Nupur Priya, Founder, Nupur Creatives. Profits generated will be rerouted to the welfare of the artisans for the CraftsVilla Artisan Fund, which help educate the children of artisans from Kutch. Apart from this, Monica is also spearheading other initiatives like an online channel CraftsVilla TV, which will feature two minute videos documenting the process of crafting the product. The products ranging from soaps to food items, clothes and jewellery priced between Rs 39 to Rs 39,000, Monica now has 500 sellers on board but selling the idea to them was not an easy task. “Initially, they were very skeptical about it because there is no marketplace in India, which can directly connect artisans to consumers. So we had to buy stocks from them, get it online on CraftsVilla, sell it and show them,” said Gupta.  An artisan named Sohail makes silk Bandhni dupattas, which takes him around 40 days for which he charges around Rs 1,500. Gupta asked him to come online, sell on CraftsVilla. “Initially, there was distrust, we bought some stock from him, which were sold in a week's time and those customers were so satisfied that they said we want more of these. We showed the figures to Sohail, explained him how it was so easy, he doesn't have to even pay anything upfront. He pays his commission only when he sells. So that first incidence of sale helped him get the concept of e-commerce.” Having overcome initial challenges with the support of her family, Monica has managed to register one lakh users and sooner hopes to have 10,000 sellers and one million products online. For the monthly growth rate of 25% and a current turnover of Rs 2.5 crore, Monica is looking to log a turnover of Rs 25 crore by 2013 and a Rs 1,000 crore by 2018. Also watch the accompanying video.