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Play time: Want to try pole-dancing, rug making or ice baths this weekend?
Who’d have thought that tea ceremonies, watch-making and mixology would be a hit among young people? See what everyone’s signing up for these days
It’s those pesky Millennials again! Business analysts have blamed young people for killing so many industries. Our love for artisanal businesses has put department stores in trouble. Our streaming binges have pulled the plug on cable TV. We want situationships, not marriage, so diamonds are going unsold. We don’t want golf, long-term jobs, or handkerchiefs. We prefer to spend money on pizza-making workshops, pottery classes, knitting groups, hula hooping, heritage tours, even pickleball.
So, what’s next? The cool kids are into tufting, mixology, sound baths, watchmaking, perfume crafting, Japanese tie-dye, magic, acapella harmonising and building terrariums. Many participants are signing up solo, bringing a date, or going with friends. Workshops are where we’re celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, breakups. Here’s a closer look at what’s happening.
Tuft luck
Most people haven’t heard of tufting, the process of injecting yarn (via a special tufting gun) into a thick mesh, to create textured, fluffy rugs and carpets. Artisans typically mount their mesh on a sturdy frame, and use the gun to follow a pattern, using yarns of different colours and textures to create their design. The crunchy sound of excess yarn being trimmed away? That’s just bonus ASMR.
Sanchay Puri, 35, had seen a rug his friends had made at a tufting studio in Canada and knew it was something young Indians would like to try out too.
It’s more beginner-friendly than crochet. A standard tufting frame takes around two-and-a-half hours to complete. And once done, customers get to take their masterpieces home.
So, in April 2024, he opened Go Rug Yourself in Gurugram, offering tufting sessions and workshops in three-hour time slots. “Our team walks you through the basics of using the tufting gun for the first 10-15 minutes before you dive into your design. Don’t worry, using the gun is easier than it sounds,” assures Puri.
Word spread fast. He had over 500 customers in the first two months. “It’s incredibly therapeutic, and keeping things easy allows you to relax and soak in the creative experience,” says Puri.
Participants make more than rugs. A session, with a little planning a creativity, can result in either a two-foot long rug or piece of wall art. “One standout is a Spotify song code created by one of our customers. When scanned, it played his favourite song,” Puri says. “It’s such a cool and personal touch to the tufting experience!”
Treasure trove
Raunak Munot, 38, knows that young people want to do more than spend their lives at the pub, the mall or in front of another screen. He founded Trove Experiences in 2019 with a friend to organise offbeat experiential activities in Pune, and has since expanded to Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Goa.
They offer sessions in mixology, perfumery, horology, Japanese tea ceremonies, aeromodelling and cook-alongs. And young India is surprising them. “We were once pitched a hing tasting experience in Delhi by a prominent brand,” Munot says. “There are 200+ varieties of asafoetida in the world, we didn’t think the activity was enough to be turned into an experience. But you never know.”
The horology experience is typically sold out days in advance. People get to disassemble a watch movement. “When you disassemble 25 to 30 intricate parts, one by one, while looking through a loupe, you experience what ‘clockwork precision’ really means,” Munot says. “The industry term for features in a watch is ‘complications’, that word starts to make sense too.”
Pole dancing is a popular pick too, as is graffiti. “While the OG experience would be on a city wall, permissions, weather conditions and availability of a comfortable space were constraints we wanted to avoid. So, we partner with venues where we can mount two-three big canvases,” says Munot.
Roughly 40% of people that sign up for an experience at Trove come solo. The rest is a combination of couples on dates or groups of two to four friends. “We’ve also often seen strangers becoming friends, or participants forming their own WhatsApp groups focused on similar activities,” he says.
In fact, Munot says that, for every 100 new bookings they get across India, roughly 23 come from those who have already been to a Trove Experience before. The wellness-oriented activities are especially popular. Their monthly ice bath events have 15-20 participants for each two-hour session, each of whom pays ₹2000 to plunge into a pod for eight-10 minutes, after a series of high-intensity exercises and breathwork.
Munot knows that young people are interested in new experiences. “Our time spent online has created a strong yearning for something offline and tactile, especially after the pandemic,” he says. “Plus, Millennials are getting married later, having kids later (if at all), and have the money to spend on activities and the interest in meeting new people after they’ve left their core friends behind when they moved cities.”
So, his team picks activities that are new, Instagram-friendly, easy to do, hands-on and take no longer than a few hours to master. Up next: Horse riding, stargazing and kitchen gardening. Hey, it’s better than another rerun of The Big Bang Theory on the weekend.
From HT Brunch, February 01, 2025
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