A Start up Tale of a techie couple, which is luring the fashion minds in the women’s clothing market!
The zeal to build a sustainable ecosystem to showcase the rich and diverse traditional Indian crafts to the world has driven this Chennai couple to start up Matkatus! Vidya, holds an Engineering dual degree from College of Engineering, Guindy. After her stints at Infosys and Royal Bank of Scotland in Chennai, Bangalore and the US, she decided to give up on her decade-long career to venture her dream ‘Matkatus’ along with Saiganesh. Saiganesh holds an Executive Management degree from IIM Kolkata and Engineering degree from University of Madras, and he was into state of art VLSI chip designing when he decided to venture into Matkatus. Taking a plunge full time from high-tech chip designing was a tough yet important call to make. His role with technology companies including Qualcomm and Wipro took him abroad frequently exposing him to the passionate rigour with which countries and cultures preserved their arts and crafts.
Being first generation entrepreneurs, the bumpy ride so far has given them thrills and surprises. The urge to bridge the contemporary aesthetics with the traditional handcrafts, grew into Matkatus as we see it now.
The couple affirm the fact that even centuries ago, our native artisans were so very advanced in their process, creative in their products, scientific in their techniques and they say that this is something that we need to be proud of. The need to uphold our crafts is not just to preserve them but the sheer beauty of the art deserves to be better represented and taken across to the global audience. So when they geared up to roll out their entrepreneurial journey, their inclination was unilateral towards setting up an Online Ethnic Handcrafts store. However it was never an easy decision to make. To give up on a technical career based on one’s expertise to venture into an amateur genre of business was downright gutsy and the couple had envisioned a clear insight to acknowledge this.
Starting from square one, the couple played smart to strike the balance between family and work. Their family vacations had become business trips in disguise, wherein they interacted with more and more artisans to understand the crafts and the Eco-system. They travelled extensively to the length and breadth of the country to curate and distinguish between the fine and the mediocre. Vidya also took the courses from Ministry of Textiles before setting afoot. These courses enabled her to comprehend the vast spread of various traditional Indian weaves and crafts. She believes that she had a right platform to learn and deep dive which also aligned to her interests in building a strong foundation for the business.
“We were done with our ground work but still remained unsure of what we were up to. The website was live but still a work in progress. When one fine morning, no actually a fine evening, we received our first order for a Mul cotton Saree and a Ikat fabric from a customer in Bangalore. From that day, there was no looking back. We still have no idea how just organic searches have dragged us so far, but it did the magic for us.” Vidya recollects about their first order.
Matkatus as a word can be quite tricky to pronounce. But the uniqueness of the word comes from two Indian Silk varieties Matka and Tussar. The products at Matkatus are not just handcrafted but also carefully handpicked. Working with artisans across the country, Matkatus believes in simple and elegant designs.
Matkatus is currently bootstrapped with respect to funding. After the initial seed capital, they have been self-sustaining and driving their own growth. The Founders believe that this gradual and steady pace of growth will help them to have strong foundation which can later support for a scale up. This approach has helped them to experiment and optimize their operations to manage the cash flow better.
” If we were to boast, we could say that we have our presence in all the continents where our species abodes. We ship to more than 30 countries. We would want to strengthen our presence within India and across the world. We are keen to indulge ourselves into other allied areas of Indian crafts and this again would provide us a necessary thrust for further expansion. We had initially concentrated more on understanding the products and stabilizing the process and now we are working on expansion” Saiganesh shares his future plans for Matkatus.
They have a clear set goals for the next one year which includes doubling the product spread, moving forward from curation to custom designs, automating the inventory management and order processing and so on. They are committed in making the brand Matkatus, to be synonymous with quality products, intricate designs and a delightful customer experience.
Through Matkatus their vision is to converge the artist’s innovations with the market orientation, so as to create products which uphold the artistry and gel with the current trends. Their aim is to eliminate the geographical restrictions of a customer to culminate their fashion dreams. And their journey is all set to broaden.
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