At indibni, special relations deserve special gifts and
when we talk about love, well it is
the special someone in our life that grabs the position for Valentine’s Day. And for that special someone, we came up with
our exclusive product range.
Valentine’s Day
What is all about this one hell of a day?
It is not just a day but it is a whole bunch of days - the
Valentine’s week. All the shopping streets in this week are swarmed up with
chocolates, roses, teddy bears and love cards. You would see lots and lots of
things neatly wrapped in pinks and reds. There would be couples coochie-cooing
over candle light dinners and the pissed off singles complaining about how worthless
and wasteful this week is.
What do we think
about Valentine’s Day?
For us Valentine’s Day 2015 is not just a day but a journey,
a journey through which the entire team indibni has traveled together. Our
philosophy is valuing relations and we make gifts for them. Valentine’s Day is
just an opportunity for us to produce cute little things for lovers, and these
little things of love had to go through a long way of planning process.
The Kickstart
Dec 15, 2014 The first meeting headed by our strategic head CA Siddharth, with our creator Nitin, executor Ankit and transformer Khushbu for planning the Valentine's Day 2015. It begin with setting up timeline first, planning and writing every detail and taking prints and putting it up at everyone's workplace.
After that we were all set for next two months.
Illustration of
Design process on our wall size white board
The Design Process
1. Rattling the Brain with R&D
Understanding user needs, exploring various materials and
form, checking the utility, exploring the market, looking for what’s a hit, the
best selling products on love, doing surveys, group discussions with people
having expertise in various fields, taking their feedback; We did it all and on
the basis of that, we cultivated our ideas, our product range, how we can be
different, how we can be competitive, these were the questions we always kept
asking into the blank space. With more and more clarity coming to us after
every team meeting, we proceeded with our ideas and our theme and finalized the number of products along with their graphic, form and material.
2. Ideation & Conceptualization
Sketches Sketches Sketches! As creating
a theme is not that easy, we had to make sure that we had a bulk of ideas to
begin our work with. We started up with doodling all the feelings about
love, eavesdropping the drenched in love phone conversations happening around
us, being a freak and asking philosophical questions to others, “how it is like
to be in love?”. But what was the best part about it, we loved doing it, asking
people on “what they think about love” and we got all kind of answers, corny
ones, quirky ones and kinky ones.
Raveena managed to get some “that-might-make-sense” sketches
out of all doodles, Ntin was there to guide her on the sketches and improvise
them. Khushbu prepared the content and our
mentor Ms Sonali Jain helped us with her valuable inputs for the
finalizing the content.
After making our wide mood boards and sketches, we concluded our final
characters, models sheets, expression charts, attitude poses, color charts ,
font of the theme; everything essential for making our designs alive when
blended with the form of final product.
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Sketches and
ideation: A messy board is a happy board
3. Digitization
With concepts ready on sketches, we stepped further towards
digitization and it was time for the design team to get their hands dirty on
the software. After endless coffee mugs and many nights of staying at the
office, we were able to get those graphics there on the computer screen, but
this did not happen quick, it took like millions of revisions and we have not
yet included the revisions of the books.
But yes after all the
revisions the graphics actually started looking pretty and improved than
before just like how rajnikant looks when he is off set and how different he
looks when he is on set. When all graphics were
ready, we could hear them shouting and screaming, “give us out for sampling”,
and so we had to just send them off to production department. Once they were
gone, Nitin and Raveena took a sigh of relief.
Digitization: the
raw artwork of King/Queen of Hearts
Digitization:
Creation of the font designed for Vday theme
PS : Everybody here is a coffeeholic, so much that it was
actually our inspiration for the “You are cream to my coffee” Coffee mug).
4. Prototyping
Once we were at a good position with the status of our
products, the design team started knocking the doors of production department.
Ankit did a great job in providing with the prototypes. He was able to get us
the samples and looking at them we were like, “a little improvisation and
woahhh!, we are ready to put ourselves in the market”. Then Khushbu used her
expertise in testing the quality and durability of the product, and after her
approval, Ankit geared up for the production cycle.
Along with that the pretty serious atmosphere of the office
started dissolving away and we could focus on the fun part, “Product Cataloging”
!!
Now this was fun for us for many reasons. Ravikant was there
for Product photography, Arnab and Rishab also joined us and the team just got
bigger. Mohit and Raveena became our models and the most important thing was we
got to hold and use the products on which we had been working on (especially
the Oh-so-cozy cushions). Khushbu used her articulation skills for preparing
the write-ups & product details, supported by the awesome photographs.
Behind the scene : Photography work in progress
5. Production
Soon
enough after pushing off the designs into the production cycle, our office
started swarming up with the raw materials, piles of fillers that needed to be
put inside the cushions, occupied one corner. The coffee mugs, key chains and
fridge magnets all were produced and brought in cartons. The wall clocks, along
with its machinery and needles, were also brought in and kept on the racks. Krishna
with his team started working on assembling the clocks, arranging the set of 8
postcards, putting the fillers in the cushions, etc.
6. Positioning
The products which were now ready, required a market to be
placed into. We have association with online portals and offline stores to
which our products were required to be sent. From the online marketplaces like amazon,
ebay, snapdeal, binocolor and fabfurnish to offline places like crossword and poparazzi,
we positioned our “Valentine’s day”
product range.
PS : It might seem an easy task, but believe us it is NOT.
7. Promotion
Our promotion techniques were newsletters, google ad words,
special offers, social media marketing, facebook promotions, and the most amazing
one was the #LOVEis contest, this
contest was about asking people what they think about love and answer with a
picture of themselves. We received amazing thoughts and it was fun hosting the
competition.
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Winners of #LOVEis contest
8. OPM (Order Process Management)
As the valentine’s week was already looming over us, we had
orders laid up by now and Khushbu was looking after all the order processing.
The gifts were wrapped neatly with a brown paper and tied with a red ribbon
(the classic indibni wrapping) along with the personalized message of the
sender. A feedback card was also included. The gifts which were all ready now
were dispatched one by one to the love birds around the globe.
9. Feedback
The last and the most important thing which we require is
the feedback. We have already got some valuable feedback from our customers and
we are always eager to know what experience our products provides them, as our
products have a high emotional value, feedback plays a very key role in it.
And as it is said
that love is not a destination it is a journey, It was a great experience for us
to go through this journey towards the Valentine’s Day. (this is our process in just one picture
which we call the process of “happiness”.)
Valentine Day 2015 Worksheet: Process of Happiness
PS : Did we forget to mention, we got a little time for
ourselves to celebrate this ♥Day in indibni way!
Special Mention : We would like to express our gratitude towards all our
mentors for being with us at every step and helping us improvising and getting
better, and all our valuable customers for inspiring us to create unique gifts.
You can check our STORE for our products designed for every relation.
You can check our STORE for our products designed for every relation.
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