Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Get yourself Caricatured @ Dezains.com


Who says caricatures go hand in hand with only celebrities and political bigwigs? In keeping with the latest trend, personalized caricatures on coffee mugs, posters, T-shirts, and the like, are being bandied as gift ideas. Recognizing the potential of the idea, Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari decided to quit well-paying jobs to start Dezains Inc., a company that specializes in designing caricature-inspired products.

Dezains.com helps you get your photos, memories and celebrities in caricatured form on different articles including tee shirts, coffee mugs etc. The talented cartoonists at Dezains hand-draw caricatures based on your photos, and print them on t-shirts of your desired brand.

It’s really simple to place an order with them. You just have to browse your photo in order form, and put your details there. After that, you will get an option to choose t-shirt from some of the major brands including Killer, Wrangler, Lee, NumeroUno, etc.

The prices of all the items are published on their portal. Just fill in the details and they will send across the finished product within a span of few days. Dezains aims to offer the highest quality available, the fastest delivery times and the fairest prices.
Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari

Vatsa, a 25-year-old from Patna, and 24-year-old Kothari, who hails from Mumbai, have known each other since their engineering days at BITS Pilani. While Vatsa graduated in 2009, Kothari graduated in 2010. Both were expected to follow a career in engineering, but the duo was more interested in T-shirt designing.

However, they knew that the market was oversaturated. Says Kothari: "Customized printed tees is available dime a dozen, so it would have been hard to capitalize on these. Moreover, it's difficult to personalize each product."

The product differentiator was staring them in the face. Vatsa's elder brother, Amrit, had been designing caricatures for free on his blog, but it was Vatsa, who was working with a coaching center in Mumbai at the time, recognized its potential. “We didn't quit our jobs immediately as we wanted to save as much as possible for the start-up," says Kothari. The buffer time also served another important purpose-test-proofing the concept.

Dezains officially launched in August, 2011 and with a little buzz created pre-launch, Dezains saw 1600 visitors on the first day. They have been growing steadily ever since and process 25-30 orders each day now. Having served over 3000 customers by now, Dezains employs 3 fulltime and 6 part-time caricature artists. Dezains has a huge fan base in the online space with more than 50,000 fans on the Facebook page. They have also teamed up with seal sites like Groupon and Anapdeal to accelerate sales.