With a simple motive to take people back to their roots and help them connect to their culture, the founders of Craftsvilla started a journey in 2011. Since its inception, the company strove to stick to its vision as they embraced growth. Former Amazon executive who is now chief business officer at Craftsvilla, Manish Kalra, talks about the exciting journey leading up to one of the most successful ethnic marketplaces.
What is the story behind the company?
India is a diverse country with ethnic diversity. As an organisation, our vision is to connect people back to their roots. Keeping that in mind, we started curating different art forms and different crafts across the country, eventually venturing into apparel.
Today, there are around 20 fabrics, 25 art forms and 25 craft forms, coming from various parts of India, available on Craftsvilla. Our vision is to connect people back to their roots through the portal we have built in and also provide more opportunities to people who are making these unique things in their respective regions and ensure that they get an opportunity to sell across the country. So, that is the story behind the inception of Craftsvilla.
Will Craftsvilla provide customised products on its portal?
At some point of time, ecommerce scales and tends to get standardised. We ventured into readily made art forms and craft forms, but we have not forayed into made-to-order or bespoke specifically as our customers want their products within shorter timeframe. If you start curating such products then it has its own timeline as you have to go to the artisan and the manufacturer.
We would go on expanding in various categories, keeping in mind the ethnicity and the culture behind it, so that we are able to connect people back to their roots.
Is there any social angle behind your business?
Definitely, there is a social angle. We try to curate communities and artisans who can come and sell. Over time, we realized that they are largely unorganised and do not have standardised products. However, that has become a small portion of our overall business as we evolved and also more players have come into picture, making the business more standardised and organised.
What is the differentiating factor from competition in the same space?
There are two things that differentiate us from our competition. Firstly, we are very much online and will continue to stay online. Unlike our competition, we are able to provide products across the price bands. We have like 3 million stock keeping units (SKUs) listed in our merchandise. A physical player can never cater to that kind of merchandise and selection. We do not have to bear the expenses of having physical stores like our competition, making pricing reasonable.
How does the entire supply chain work in your case?
In case of apparel, we engage with manufacturers and resellers and then we have a QC team. After the QC team gets the product certified, only then do products get listed on our website.
We don’t have our own warehouse, nor have we invested in our own logistics company, so that we remain lean in terms of operation. We have ensured that we are open marketplace and stay with good sellers who then pack the products in our packaging. This then goes to our appointed courier partners like FedEx and Aramex. The courier companies pick up the products from our seller and supply it to the user. This is completely managed through algorithms and software without any physical intervention. Service-level agreements (SLA) with our sellers and courier partners ensure timely delivery of products. That way we are able to provide to the customer the right experience without over investing in physical warehousing.
What is the value proposition that you are giving to your customer?
I think anything ethnic that you can dream of buying, you should be able to find it in Craftsvilla. We have found that majority part of our business comes from women’s categories like fashion, footwear, accessories, jewellery, traditional bags and so on. We have expanded into men’s ethnic wear and have got into food category which will be integrated soon. Then there are organic products, personal care products, home décor items which are again very traditional.
With more and more categories emerging, we believe that customers will have access to everything under one store. This is our differentiator.
Is there a provision for value-adding services like suggesting tips about jewellery or artifacts?
We have just curated a team for the same that includes a set of stylists and people who have an expertise in all these fabrics and crafts. We witnessed a lot of engagement for our Facebook posts and emailers with style tips and trends. So, we planned to execute this value-add which will be operational in next 13 days. This would be one of the big consumer value-add that we will bring on the table.
Which cities drive maximum traffic to Craftsvilla?
Our customer base is not limited to high internet penetration cities like Metro or top 20 cities, but we have people buying products from small towns and cities. There is a significant portion, which comes from outsides these top 20 cities
Does Craftsvilla have demand coming from outside of India?
We saw a lot of demand coming in from NRIs across the globe. In fact, most of our products are shippable to international geographies as well. We are curating portion of our site, which will be exposed to only international IPs. If you are logging into Craftsvilla from outside of India you will get to see a different set of pages on Craftsvilla. We have curated that international site based on the taste of customers located in US, UK, UAE, Australia or Sri Lanka.
Do you plan to acquire any more businesses?
We look at synergies. If someone has a capability or a skillset which we will take time to acquire or build on our own, then we would happily evaluate various levels of acquisitions or opt for acquihiring. We are open to synergistic partnerships, whether it is an on acquisition or acquihiring, but definitely keeping in the mind the interest of the user and the business.
Compared to other players in the space, what makes Craftsvilla so successful?
It is just about staying lean and ensuring you are using software, algorithms and data to define customer experience, rather than going physically heavy on investing on people, warehouses, logistics and then incurring huge cost which ecommerce business is unable to support.
Players like Amazon also sell ethnic wear and also indulge in a lot of advertisements and discounting. Do you see any threat from players like that?
In my perceptive, there are two kinds of players in ecommerce – horizontal and vertical players. The horizontal players are focused on width of selection, while vertical players like us are able to provide great depth of unique selection which may not be available on some of these horizontals.
What is the future plan of Craftsvilla?
Our future plan is to keep investing in this category. India is a huge market. There are lot of geographies offering variety of ethnic products. So, we will keep adding more and more categories. We are small right now in organic, personal care and Ayurveda, but we will keep investing in those categories. Our future plan is to offer great products at great prices to benefit the users.
