Are you thinking of designing a tee or a hoodie for your classmates, or perhaps your colleagues? You wouldn’t have to look further than Alma Mater’s PLAY, dubbed as ‘social networking site for tees’ that would make a designer of you in minutes. Introduced into the market last month by the Alma Mater, an online store, PLAY offers merchandise that you can customise, order from home and get delivered within 12 days. PLAY is an easy to use tool with unique features such as free hand doodle, an option to remove the irksome white background that comes when you upload an image, and the option to create a group for your college, company, gang where you can share your designs.
Alma Mater’s founders Varun Agarwal and Rohn Malhotra stumbled upon the idea for their online school/college memorabilia store while sitting inebriated reminiscing about their school at Noon Wines, a pub in Bangalore. They wrote down their business idea on a piece of tissue — ‘to make merchandise for schools and colleges’. Their idea didn’t fizzle out by morning and their lack of business experience didn’t become a deterrent.
They both invested Rs1 lakh in this start-up from their own personal savings and managed the company without taking a loan. Their first tees and hoodies were for their own school- Bishop Cotton Boy’s School.
The problems and glitches they faced in starting up their own company is entertainingly told in Varun’s debut book How I braved Anu Aunty and Co Founded a Million Dollar Company. He wrote this book within eight days during a bout of flu. “We didn’t have any money for marketing, to put ads in TV or newspapers. So we used social media to market our products.” says Varun. The manufacturing is done in-house to help bring down the costs and maintain quality and service.
Varun graduated with a BTech degree in telecommunications and has been running an independent production company called Last Minute Films since 2008. He is also passionate about filmmaking. At 26, he has three companies to his credit — Alma Mater, Reticular, a social media marketing agency, and Last Minute Films.
Rohn Malhotra is a BCom graduate who was working as a management consultant at KPMG before he became the co-founder of Alma Mater.
Varun enthuses, “In the coming few months we will adding a lot of cool new features on PLAY. This includes a caricature option. Here you can upload your photo and the Play Tool will automatically make a caricature out of it. We’re also adding the word jumbler option. Using this, you can add names of all your classmates, team members or group members in a shape or form.”
These entrepreneurs are also planning to include iPhone and smartphone cases and mugs to the list of customised merchandise. “We want our company to be the go to brand for customised merchandise. What
motivates us now as entrepreneurs is ensuring innovation” says Varun.
The titular Anu Aunty would be proud!
— aswatianand@gmail.com