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Startup Mantra: One-stop solution for gifting requirements
Rashmi Ponkshe founded Magnifi-scenes in Pune, offering customized gifting solutions, blending creativity with market demand for personalized gifts.
PUNE Sometimes a business is born when one thing leads to another, as was the case for Rashmi Ponkshe, a research analyst who later became a professor of economics at Fergusson College. In 2016, she founded Magnifi-scenes Total Gifting Solutions as a home-based business in Pune, and in 2019, she registered the company as a sole proprietorship
The train of her life was chugging along till Rashmi saw the collection of photographs she had amassed on her holidays over the years. “It was almost as though these photographs were begging for another life besides the ones they had in my albums,” says Rashmi.
An idea is born
Rashmi’s husband who is in the merchant navy and had sailed across the world, sometimes with her and many a time without had taken photographs of glaciers in South America, captured the beauty of different ports, sunsets across the seas and the skies and more. So Rashmi decided to find other uses for them. “I was always interested in designing, and these photographs were so wonderful that I felt I must do more with them.” More she did. She imagined how these photos would look on coffee mugs, coasters, and calendars. They became gift items that were appreciated by the people she gave them to.
In May 2016, Rashmi participated in an exhibition, where the reimagined photos of her husband were a big hit. People loved the mugs, coasters, and other newer expressions of those photos. The response led her to get into the gifting business.
Initial hurdles
But making profits needs more than just a need to find creative expression. And Rashmi understood this well. “There are two types of gifting B to C (business-to-consumer) and B to B (business-to-business). When it comes to B-C gifting, people can pick up from their nearby stores that generally are budget-friendly but may not have attractive products or choices.
“Then there are the malls from where they have several attractive gifting options that are many a time unaffordable. But in both the options I noticed that people do not have the option of getting their gift items personalised, either in size or design,” says Rashmi.
“In the B to B sector, corporates need an end-to-end gifting solution for their clients. Thus they prefer to give it to vendors who can give them any product that is customisable. The designs need to be as per their requirement and so they prefer vendors who offer customisation in both the product and design. Logos are very important to a corporate body and this requires professional designing skills, which is why they prefer vendors who have such capabilities. In addition to this, there is an increasing awareness regarding eco-friendly products and packaging.” And since the market cannot offer all these elements in one place, Rashmi found a gap that she could fill perfectly. What started as a showcase of magnificent photographs from their personal albums on various products via different printing techniques now led to a wide portfolio of customised merchandise with different design themes. What started with cups, calendars, and coasters now moved to varied surfaces, materials such as jute, fabric, plant holders and more.
Rashmi explains this. “Customers approach us with different ideas and visualisations regarding design themes and we give that a definitive form through an appropriate design creation on a suitable product. So when Halliburton wanted to give a gift for Yoga Day we designed the tee shirts for them. Or Liten Automotive India was looking for packaging we designed one with Jute and their logo.”
To market, to market to sell her wares
Exhibitions and friends and family can do only so much. “So though we first launched our merchandise through exhibitions in Pune we got on to the Amazon platform in 2019 to have a wider reach. We shipped everywhere all across the country. But the problem was that when you have a heterogeneous product like ours, such as a customised coffee mug or a tee shirt, then it’s not possible to get the benefits of scale since customising changes the cost and the profit margins.”
Which then led her to corporate gifting. “I learnt designing so I could give clients better customisable options. I even put up a lot of my designs listed on Shutterstock which also helped.”
But her first customer, Cosmos Bank was a result of joining different business forums and other professional networking communities such as BNI and TiE Pune. “We were also active on social media and an entrepreneur friend who was following me regularly and knew the client personally connected us to Cosmos Bank that was looking for a gift for its women employees on Women’s Day Celebrations and we designed planters with potted plants that we delivered to all their female employees across India.”
Investment
“I started small with an initial investment of ₹10,000 that came from my savings. Initially, we made about ₹5000- ₹60,000 from sales to family, friends and exhibitions. But since our move into the B to B sector we are now seeing revenues of ₹5 lakh and growing slowly. We have reached out to big corporates with our designs and some are in the sampling stage.” She is not looking at raising funds just yet as the ship is sailing on its winds just fine.
Competition
Several companies are looking for a slice of the same pie. Says Rashmi, “There are other gifting startups who generally provide gift hampers. This means they source ready-made products from different vendors, which makes them aggregators. They do work on a larger scale, while ours is a niche offering. Our USP is customisation. Right from the design creation, and printing of designs to final delivery of the product, every step is unique. Some of our products are designed and developed in-house. Our competitors, when they do provide some designing, it is outsourced. But we specialise in designing and do not outsource any of these services.”
So how do you plan to compete with the big players in the gifting business? Says Rashmi, “Currently, we are not in a position to compete with the big brands or any international brands as of now since we do not cater to the international market yet. But would scale up the team size and our operations in the future for the same.”
Future plans
“We plan to enable sales of different products from our website. This should be ready very soon. Also, we plan to develop a gift design app where people can describe what customisation they want and we can execute it.”
One thing may have led to another that resulted in Magnifi-scenes Total Gifting Solutions, but building on it and taking it into the future has been the result of Rashmi’s astuteness and creative thinking.
