Garage Labs Technologies Private Limited, the company behind Cupick.Com, a social community for artists that allows them to merchandize their paintings, has closed a seed round of fund of $120k from a set of US and Indian angel investors through TermSheet.Io.
Several angel buyers from the US and India participated in this spherical along with JKN Partners (an angel syndicate) and Sushil Agarwal from India and Kalpesh Shethia, Rajeev Mudumba, Dinesh Tadepalli and Sudheshna Vuppala from the United States. Previously, Shaishav and Justin has also based a webapp known as Whoopey.
Commenting at the funding, Jignesh Patel of JKN Partners stated, “We are satisfied to be part of the exciting business that Cupick is constructing. At JKN Partners, we’re constantly looking for ideas that resolve actual issues and disrupt the reputation quo. Cupick has a awesome product, the proper thoughts and a nicely-balanced team that may execute the plan.”
An American fashion fashion designer and creator, Mary McFadden as soon as said
India a gold-mine of artwork. The richest within the global.
India has constantly been the playfield for many remarkable artists and craftsmen. These artists are growing wondrous designs however don’t have the most suitable assets to monetise their artwork.
Founder and Ceo of Cupick, Shaishav Todi says, “Even if an artist manages to start his very own brand, attracting a regular traction is a major project, which in the end ends in the extinction of such brands.”
Identifying this big hole between artists and vending of art work, three vintage friends, Shaishav Todi, Justin Alva and Rituraj Dowerah based Cupick launched a social community for artists that allows them to merchandize their artwork. The organization was released in September 2014 and had raised approximately $15k (INR 10 Lakh) in investment to begin with.
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The Idea
With Cupick, the founders desired that the artists have to now not be involved about the logistics of vending their paintings. The platform lets in artists to certainly upload their paintings on the portal as they do on social media. Rest of the tedious responsibilities like production, transport, selling and price are all handled by using Cupick.
“There are loads of thousands of artists developing beautiful art work however with no way to monetize or reach out to a larger target market. Then there are large copyright holders sitting on big repositories of idle creative property. Cupick allows them monetize this asset class via merchandising.” says Shaishav Todi. “We need to make art consumable and in system, add fee to the underlying asset.”
How it Works
On signup, artists are given a private profile web page to exhibit portfolio of work.
Art is made reachable to a huge target audience.
Cupick sets a base price for each product, then artists upload their markup above this which then determines the selling fee. For instance, an A3 poster has the base prize of INR one hundred fifty and if artists chooses to promote it on a hundred% markup, then the product can be priced at INR 300 plus taxes.
Company then handles all of the logistics like manufacturing, packaging, delivery, payments and customer service of the product.
Due to the presence of such a lot of artists, Cupick is a platform of folks that recognize proper design and art. Thus, imparting a big community attain to the artists.
Revenue Model
Cupick’s price and margins are blanketed inside the set base rate for every product. Whereas, the artists are given the markup rate, which they decide themselves. So going by means of the equal A3 poster example, Cupick earns INR a hundred and fifty and the artist additionally receives INR 150 as the markup price turned into 100%. However, for T-shirts and Hoodies, the most markup rate is 20%, so the artist can’t earn above 20%of the base fee. Other than that, posting of art work and product delivery is freed from fee.
Art is the maximum intense mode of individualism that the arena has regarded. Going through these words of Oscar Wilde, Cupick objectives at growing an individualistic enjoy for its customers. Justin Alva, Co-Founder and CMO says, “With a median price tag length of INR 1,000, we plan on targeting the city operating or collegiate class of the country, individuals who can relate with those designs.”
Important Figures
Cupick has visible over 2500 artists register on its web page with over 9000 works of art uploaded.
Ratio of New v/s Old clients: 15-20 % of the users are ordinary clients.
Average Ticket Size: INR 1,000
Cities Operational in: Pan-India Delivery
Product Categories: Post Cards, Greeting Cards, Posters, Art Prints, Canvases, T-shirt, Hoodies
No. Of Vendors: three
Innovation
Cupick had ran campaigns in the past, i.E; ‘Design for Kashmir’ and ‘Bombay Velvet Campaign’
Design for Kashmir became introduced on the time when Cupick was set for release, and so, at the twenty first of October, they opened shop and went live with the Design for Kashmir collective with the purpose of monetizing and the use of the proceeds for alleviation efforts in flood-affected Kashmir.
Bombay Velvet Campaign was released with the intention to paintings together with the Bombay Velvet group (Phantom Films and Fox Star India) to generate buzz on social media by leveraging the influential artist network. They launched the Official fan poster design contest which noticed over 90 submissions, 2000+ votes cast at some stage in the 12-day period of the contest.
Tackling the Challenges
One of the major trouble that the startups in this particular space is that they have got deal with copyright violation. Justin too believes that it is impossible to reveal each and every artwork uploaded onto Cupick. “Like another platform (Youtube, Soundcloud, Deviantart and so on), users agree that by way of importing onto Cupick, they own the copyrights or have permission to do so. Having stated that, we deal with copyright violation very severely and feature a mechanism through which each person can file a copyright violation by way of using the choice available on every artwork page,” he added.
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Competition
The organisation’s product operates inside the section of merchandise and wall decor, which makes for a healthy opposition from the likes of Postergully, Alma Mater and Bewakoof.Com. Justin stated that, Cupick differs from other players in this section, because of the fact that they allow artists to add and make art work to be had for sale instantly at the same time as being on top of things of the whole lot. However, different structures like Postergully additionally permit artists to upload their artwork- http://artists.Postergully.Com/
Also, Bluegape used to operate on this segment which use to permit artists to upload their art work on its platform observed a comparable approach however needed to put a fullstop on the merchandising enterprise because of copyright issues. On which Justin says, ” We have gear that enable the reporting of copyright violations, some thing which Bluegape didn’t have and were given them in trouble.”
Recently, Delhi-based PosterGully had raised $160K amount of angel investment via LetsVenture. The spherical was led by way of former Consultant at Egon Zehnder, Natarajan Iyer. The different contributors on this round included Rajesh Sawhney, Nish Bhutani, Vivek Mulchandani, Vikram Saxena, Mineral Enterprises Limited, Bhavika Enclave and Anuj Chowdhary.
Globally, Cupick competes with Redbubble and Society6, extensively tapping the USA and UK market.
With the new investment, Cupick plans to use the price range to swiftly expand the product lines to telephone cover, mugs and pillow covers, make investments in product improvement if you want to maintain a technological benefit and to lease key talents across special verticals. The funding will accelerate the agency’s impressive increase in asset and user.
