The Story of Alma Mater

-Pratiti Nath

Ever dreamed of a store delivering customized t-shirts, tops and all other kinds of apparel? Alma Mater is just that. Now wait! it isn’t just any other kind of customized product selling merchandise. Here you get products customized according to the institution you are affiliated to. Your very own customized college products.

Origin of the idea

"Three years ago, two friends, one too many beers, one kickass business idea, one million dollar company… This, in a nutshell is how Alma Mater came about."- this is how the alma mater story begins in their facebook page. This company is a brain child of 2 people- Varun Agarwal and Rohn Malhotra way back in 2009. They hit upon this idea while reminiscing their good old college days over a chilled beer. That’s when the idea of catering to the needs of alumni of various colleges came into light. Thus, the name Alma mater. Varun started this apparel store targeting the necessity of memorable items and apparels for different institutions alumni. Soon, after that he wrote a book titled ‘How I braved Anu Aunty and co-founded a million dollarcompany’. This became an instant hit paving the way for him and his company. The company is based in Koramangla, Bangalore.

The Journey So Far

The major feature of this online apparel website is its “PLAY” tool.  As the name suggests you can literally play with the design, graphics, colour, fabric and other aspects of your desired products. Unlike other websites they don’t offer you selected choices. Here you can make your own designs and order them. Their unique outlook and aesthetic designs led to huge leap in profits. They manage to ship 15000 products every month. 

Keeping the target audience in mind the price range remains at an affordable limit of 450-700 rupees. Till July, 2013 they have sold 3,00,000 products. With the help of these tool you can draw doodles, make designs. As many as 800 fonts and 2000 vectors are at your disposal. Apart from that you can add your institution logo and change the background colour. Thus it provides huge pool of creative potential to unleash your creativity and wear it on your t-shirt. A plus point of this tool is its social forum. One can form groups here and easily discuss & build design with their friends. Till 2013 the response is substantial with almost every associations using it – from school students, college students to start-up companies to individual group associations. The company first started out-sourcing their work but now the manufacture & printing process is solely done by their 200 dedicated workers. This has removed the hazard of relying on others and minimized errors. With the incorporation of the PLAY tool, work has cut down further as continuous involvement with the customers aren’t required. One can just create their design and order it. As of now, they have worked for 2500 schools/colleges, 600 corporates, 100 start-ups spreading over 180 different cities of the world. This includes India and 6 other countries. Till May 2016, the company website registers 323401 happy customers, 15232 customized designs, 3554 college clients and 458420 likes on facebook 

Future outlook

The current focus of the company is to be the number one merchandise in customized t-shirt & products market. Their sole agenda is to completely monopolize this market and rake the 25-30% gross margins to even greater percentage. 

The Story Of Chumbak

-Pratiti Nath

We all like to travel and collect souvenirs and mementos from places we have visited. Now, think of a foreign traveler, travelling to India and looking for objects to remember the place. Well, here the market is flooded with conventional showpieces and mementos of monuments like Taj Mahal, Howrah bridge, India gate or Qutub Minar. At best clothing like saris and pashmina shawls.

A couple from Bangalore got bored of all this. Vivek Prabhakar and Subhra Chadda thought of channelizing their frustration to come up with a business enterprise. Thus, in 2010, started the journey of Chumbak, the popular lifestyle brand. The name by itself attracts like a magnet, and indeed true to its property. As illustrated by the co-founder Vivek Prabhakar, the name means “kissing stones”. As they wanted to monopolize the Indian refrigerator magnets market. Their tagline “home is where the love is” delivers the ultimate attraction punch for a lifestyle 

The Journey so far

Chumbak with just 45lakhs arranged by the couple by selling their house. It started as a 30 member souvenir store and ended up being a 150 member lifestyle store. The duo coupled their knowledge with pragmatism. It started as an online store that continued to flood the e-commerce market. 2012 brought the opportunity of seed funding via Matrix partners. Then , in 2013 they opened their first flagship store in Bangalore. 

Visiting their store or browsing through their products will make you gasp in disbelief. It has a quirky, colourful and vibrant range products. They have a magnificent range which spoils you for choice. It has  a wide range of lifestyle products – from key chains to mementos to dresses to footwear to apparel to jewelries to bags, wallets, watches, phones- all under one roof. 38 categories with more than 500 products. Thus, here is a brand which perfectly understands your needs. Price, design, style, range, colours EVERYTHING!!!

Like all start-ups they wanted to be different but in a different way. The company philosophy is to do it in a fun and lively way. This is visible in their public interaction and eccentric vibrant range of products. They team up the curiosity of a child, the innovation of youth and the experience of a knowledgeable person. 

Another potent problem for a start-up is real estate. Subhra and Vivek were pragmatic in this matter. They started with small kiosk of 150-200 square feet and then made it to 2500 sq ft. They have 20 such kiosks with more than 60 outlets in 5 major Indian cities. Of them Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore gathers the maximum revenue (60%). 15% of sales are made through online. They are first of its kind store. They are quick to adapt with changing market dynamics and fashion trends. This lead to an unprecedented growth rate of 300%  in 5years. 

Future Venture

In the coming years they are targeting a 400 crore annual revenue. It is vying to spread its wings all over India. Their future target is to open more such kiosks in other cities. Chumbak planning to boost is online sales percentage to meet the target. 

Overall, with their unique set of ideas and executions they are a force to reckon with it. A viable start-up story for every entrepreneur dreaming to make it big.

Tips to increase employee productivity

An article in 2010 in the New York times cited a study form Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killings, who used an iPhone app to contact roughly 2,200 individuals asking them what they were doing at the moment, and how they were feeling. They received over 240,000 replies from this activity. The results: the people who reported the highest levels of pleasure were having sex, when contacted. Surprisingly 99.5% people were not having sex. They reported that their minds were wandering. This actually means they were not focused in whatever they were doing. Also those who focused reported higher levels of happiness than those who were not.  

Why are we not so focused? 

The answer to this question and how to remain focused can be found on the first few pages of the HBR August 2014-January 2015 edition.

According to me, (in agreement with the article quoted above) we are not focused because we don’t want to be. Unless an individual finds something motivating or interesting enough to be spent time on, the individual tends to not focus. Thus our minds wander, and we end up day dreaming. Some people rely on caffeine to get their focus back. And some others jump on to the internet to get a break, and then get back to what they were doing.

According to a study (HBR-Aug2014-Jan15) People spend 30-40% of their time at work attending to unplanned interruptions. Then, some more time is spent trying to get back their focus. This is because the number of tools of interruption is very high. Even during a meeting it’s hard for employees to not check their smart phones, and not to stop their minds form wandering. They think of everything except, for what is being discussed at the meeting.

It’s not that we humans can’t focus. We can. And we can do justice to being focused. The reason why people avoid focus is because, staying focused is hard work.

“Nature tends towards disorder. Focus imposes order. So focus requires energy. It requires work. It can hurt. And people often avoid work and pain.”- Edward Hallowell        

So what’s to do with this broken focus? When at work, if the mind is distracted, turn off the distraction. I mean turn off the gadget. The mobile or the computer. One can go to the lobby and just sit and breathe. If there’s problem, find a solution till the bulb shines above your head. 

Get involved. Persist.

Spend as much time as you can on the three most important things, 

1- what you are good at, 

2-what you like to do,

3- what people will pay you to do. 

At the intersection of these three areas lies the area of happiness and the order to disorder. When work is motivating and interesting one WANTs to go to work every morning, getting stuck in the long line of loud traffic. One wants to be able to sit late and work over a project. When work becomes pleasure, you will work even if it hurts. Why? Because you are focused.

To ensure the employees are focused they should have meetings, avoiding anything that is distracting. The conference room should be painted sliverish-gray, or blue, or green or purple, to bring good thoughts and great ideas to the minds at the table.

Companies could have a brief meeting every 2 hours about everything but work. Talk about music, art, movies, children, pets, anything but work. This would calm the minds of your team and help them come back quicker to what they were assigned to do. The risk here is too much of fun talk may never bring them back. The time of such meetings should be short and memorable, but never long and something for them to day dream about.

Laugh. Laughing is that cure to any irritation or disorder. Where there is laughter there is health. To ensure that the minds of your team are healthy, invest on ensuring that they laugh, as much as they can. This can also be considered a physical exercise. Hire a stand-up artist to office one day. Surprise them. Make them laugh. After all the laughing, focus comes automatically.

Organizing your mind and your team’s minds will bring in a good payoff at the end of the year. Adding high quality focus at workplaces is a great place for HR managers to start working on.

After all, good focus has the power to grow your business.