Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, August 5, 2007
Five IIT students have turned entrepreneurs off the beaten track by marketing customised T-shirts online. Business is brisk with more than 10 orders coming in daily.
Second-year students of Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM) in IIT Kharagpur — S Santosh Kumar, Nishank Agarwal, Dharmveer Arora, Ashutosh Chouksey and Amit Joshi — have launched www.webvastra.in just a month ago. Targeting students worldwide, their website offers five categories of T-shirts in different colours, with over 50 designs available in 60 varieties. All you need to do is select the T-shirt style, choose the design and then place you by paying online. Your apparel will be delivered to your doorstep within a week. The venture is being supported by STEP (Science and Technology Entrepreneur’s Park) at the IIT.
“Our aim is to ultimately become an entrepreneur. All of us were toying with various ideas and we finally zeroed in on this one,” said Nishank, who had studied civil engineering from IIT Kanpur before joining VGSOM.
But they have not set up a manufacturing unit. Instead, they outsource the T-shirts from a Tamil Nadu-based company, which exports T-shirts to large departmental stores all over the world. The garments cost not more than Rs 259 plus Rs 40 as shipping charges, which make it affordable. “This has ensured that the quality of our product is very good and we have no manufacturing headaches. However, if there are any complaints about our products, we promise to replace them,” said Dharmveer.
With only Rs 25,000 investment by each of them, the company expects to break even soon. “STEP had helped us with all kinds of formalities, tax issues followed by the guidelines for operations. We will obviously have to invest more as the business grows and would also talk to some venture capitalist to finance the project,” said Ashutosh who is looking after the operations and accounts.
Sharing the workload, Santosh and Amit are the designers and they plan to hire professional designers soon. “Though we have many designs on offer, we can also make customised designs if clients want so,” informed Santosh. While, five new designs celebrating Independence Day will be uploaded by August 7, the five buddies will introduce customised pullovers, sweaters and cardigans by this winter. Soon to follow are customised coffee and beer mugs, cups and tablemats.
The budding entrepreneurs did their homework finding out market preferences and pricing issues. “We aimed at community portals such as Orkut and also sent our web links to everyone we know and this seems to have worked well for us,” said Nishank. They now plan to attract bulk orders from various institutions.
But will they be able to sustain the undertaking after they get jobs? “Why not? Everything is pre-set and web-based, we will not be required to put in much effort,” said Nishank.
mou.hindustantimes@yahoo.com
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