Forging A Digital Ecosystem For Creative Entrepreneurs
From Living at a Hostel to Joining a Startup
Apaar Gupta spent his formative school years in a hostel. As a student of the Birla Public School at Pilani, he learned, early on, to survive without the attentiveness and pampering of parents. Like many Indian kids of his generation, he was expected to leverage his academic smarts to crack an engineering entrance exam. Though his passion lay in journalism, having relished school debates and other wrangles with words, he submitted to parental strictures.
Keen on being admitted into the nation’s most prized brand – the IIT – he spent a year wrestling with aldehydes and ketones, semiconductors, and optics. A year that only reinforced his earlier disinterest in engineering. Nonetheless, he made it to the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) at Mumbai, where he surprisingly enjoyed four years studying Information Technology. There were, as well, the appeals of Mumbai, the throbs of the commercial and cultural capital. Habituated to autonomy from his school years, he thrived in the “new city, with new friends, meeting new people and soaking up a new culture.”
In his final year, he was intent on cracking the CAT, the entrance exam to the pedigreed IIMs. Despite his impressive percentile, that was the year in which IIM tweaked its admission criteria to favour candidates with work experience and from non-engineering backgrounds. A percentile that would have qualified for a top-tier IIM in a previous year was no longer an open sesame.
After an MBA in Marketing at IMT, Ghaziabad, when it came to campus recruitment, Gupta was clear about his temperament. He wasn’t galvanized about working ten years in a single company and scaling linear ladders to senior positions. Shunning opportunities at large corporates, he interviewed with the many startups flocking there.
Learning To Hustle at the Workplace
He joined a fledgling startup called Gaadi.com which was eventually acquired by Car Dekho. As the first management trainee inside the venture, he was given a sink-or-swim role that tugged him in many directions. “You have no training, no work experience, no idea of how things work,” he recalls now. “You’re just out of college and you’re suddenly pushed into a business environment in which you feel completely uneasy.”
That stint turned out to be both exhilarating and life-changing. Asked to kickstart and manage a greenfield digitalization project with an automobile company, he needed to quickly grasp the nuances of execution. From conceptualizing a product, managing clients, running operations, assembling a team, and supervising dealers to clocking revenues. Working 15 to 16-hour days, he learned more in those eight months than many of his peers at larger companies.
After two more years at Car Dekho, he moved to another startup, Rivigo. His intent was to gather experience in diverse industry sectors, as well as to establish his own strengths. Did he prefer Sales & Marketing or Operations? About a year into his working at Rivigo, he was derailed by an unforeseen disaster.
A Family Crisis Sparks An Idea
His father ran an offline accessories business in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. He sold beads and sequins to the fashion and jewelry industry. Tragically, a short circuit sparked off a massive fire in three of his godowns, ruining not just his morale but also his financial standing. Gupta felt compelled to help his father resuscitate his enterprise.
While at his other job, he informally assisted his father by ushering new-age methods to a very traditional business. Apaar started by building a website, clicking photographs himself of the thousands of accessories that his father had been selling. Gradually, an enterprise that had been completely offline to date, started drawing online buyers.
Beyond that, he realized that there was a white space in the fashion and accessories market. Though these products – beads, sequins and other related raw materials – were used by sundry creative businesses like boutiques and tailors, shoe and handbag makers, and so on, all over the country, there was no unified online marketplace. Gupta had stumbled on the Holy Grail that many founders sought: an untapped opportunity.
By then (2017), the internet was already widespread. Yet clients trekked all the way to the Delhi outlet to pick up stocks, from places like Dehradun or Nasik. “You can order shoes online. You can order T-shirts online. Why can’t you order beads online? That’s how the business started, and we started getting some traction.”
Founding The Design Cart
When starting out, Apaar weighed the personal pros and cons of becoming a founder. To begin with, there was his inherent proclivity for adventure and risk-taking. He reveled in hustles, in handling a wide range of functions ranging from accounting to sales & marketing and operations. He vowed to give the enterprise his whole-hearted involvement for 1000 days, during which he planned to work 24 hours, hence giving his dream a 24,000-hour starting shot.
When he formally founded The Design Cart in 2018, he decided to expand the platform beyond the categories his father had been servicing. Adding fabrics, buttons, threads and a whole host of other related products, Gupta started conceiving of the enterprise as a one-stop solution for creative entrepreneurs. Currently, The Design Cart offers a wide range of Fabrics, Beads & Buttons, Embellishments & Trims, Jewelry Findings, Threads, Tools & Tassels.
The enterprise has now sustained far more than 1000 days: “We’re going to finish 2000 days this year.” Naturally, there have been ups and downs. The first COVID wave was a dampener, leading to a brief shutdown of the business. But the pandemic also helped, fuelling a heightening adoption of online transactions. Their client base grew almost tenfold.
Creating a Marketplace
They also expanded their supplier base. Since The Design Cart does not hold inventories, they have tied up with a network of over 200 producers. Some are weavers from small towns, others are textile mills or fabric importers, wholesalers and retailers. “There’s no one else who’s selling more fabrics and beads and trims and accessories than us,” says Gupta.
The fact that they don’t hold any physical inventory frees up their working capital and enables a closer attuning to fluid fashion trends. Moreover, they’re able to offer a much vaster catalogue with nuance and depth in each category. As Apaar puts it: “Each sub-category in this business has a lot of depth, since fashion is changing & evolving with each passing day”
Garnering Lessons Along The Way
Among lessons learned so far, Gupta says, focusing too intensely on the top line is not necessarily a viable strategy. In previous years, since he was keen on raising external funds, he paid more attention to his revenues, with scanter attention on profits. The bottomline had dipped so steeply, he wasn’t sure if he should even shut down the venture.
“This was four years of blood, tears, frustrations and all the hard work I’ve put in.” But he was also a fighter. He decided to give the enterprise another year while shifting his focus to bolstering profits. As he puts it: “Thankfully, in April 2023, I can happily say that we’ve been able to turn things around quite significantly and it’s all solid now.” His wife, Kriti Bhagat, also joined the enterprise, allowing him to focus on strategic areas.
He started a related service, called Design Alt, to help creative entrepreneurs build digital components and scale their businesses. Many fashion boutiques or jewelry designers are not adept at setting up websites, at listing their products on Amazon and Flipkart, or at marketing their wares on social media. Gupta leverages his own expertise and in-house team to help with those aspects.
Becoming a Finalist at Shark Tank
Their business also cleared all the rounds for qualification in the wildly-popular Shark Tank and made it to the finalists round in Season One. However, their episode was not aired on television as they possibly did not have enough “drama” in the pitch. Reflecting on their participation later, Gupta realizes he took a very business-like approach to the pitch, rather than focusing on human elements which television viewers seek. Since it had always been a dream to pitch to the “sharks”, Apaar is grateful he nearly made it: “Someday I’ll go there and fish the sharks.”
Helping Creative Entrepreneurs Mushroom
Gupta’s also heartened about the impact he’s able to forge through The Design Cart. For instance, one of their clients runs a handmade jewelry business in Tura, a town in Meghalaya with a population of 75,000 (according to the 2011 census). Nestled in the foothills of the Garo Hills, Tura is ringed by tiny rivers and verdant valleys. Such scenic splendor is bereft of marketplaces that mark the bustling, more polluted cities. Earlier the business owner used to trundle all the way to Delhi, via trains and buses to buy her raw material.
For the past five years, she hasn’t ever made that trip. More tellingly, her business has quadrupled and she’s grown from having two employees to twenty. She also says that her turnaround time to produce new designs has been drastically shortened since she can access a much wider range of raw materials with speedier deliveries. She also promotes her enterprise on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, extending her reach beyond her hilly locale. Another client from Moga, Punjab buys fabric rolls that she fashions into kurtis. Gupta says his enterprise is fuelling many such entrepreneurs.
Regarding future plans, Gupta sees The Design Cart helping creative entrepreneurs in all aspects. At this point, they’re supplying raw materials, and helping with digital expertise. Eventually, he plans to help with Sales and Marketing as well. He wants his app to be a one-stop shop for such entrepreneurs – wherein they can access products and services to propel their businesses.
References