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Bluerickshaw
To empower local artisans with technical knowledge to market their products online with low operational cost and a complete ecosystem for global trade, Akshay Wadhwa curated Bluerickshaw, a B2B export platform, an online marketplace for artisans and organizations to sell authentic handmade products globally, ensuring customers a quality purchase at a fair price.
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1. Art and Crafts is a relatively untapped sector in India. Tell us more about how and when you came up with this business Idea?
If India is known for its agriculture, then it surely is also known for art and crafts across the whole world. However, Indian artisans have faced several issues continuing their heritage of making art and have been victims of financial insecurity, lack of digital awareness, and fewer opportunities in the market.
With a backdrop of diminishing opportunities for local artisans and traditional Indian art, Akshay Wadhwa, Chief Executive Officer, and Krishan Chandak, CTO of Bluerickshaw, came up with BlueRickshaw in 2021, designed to serve as a digital platform for the local people to showcase their art. The motive was to encourage local artisans and craftsmen to explore opportunities for better financial avenues.
2. What are the challenges that you have faced so far?
Most of our buyers were used to operating in a purely offline space. They are between the ages of 45-65 and have limited technological savviness.
Last year in April, India entered nationwide lockdown which created a lot of supply-chain issues as deliveries and couriers were not operational. Because there was a restriction on international flights, couriers were impacted and our logistics price increased 5x which caused a slow in our growth. We are now seeing improvements in our traction.
3. What is your strategy to connect with small artisans/businesses in small towns of the country?
The parameters that we first take into consideration while connecting with small artisans/businesses are:
- Product Quality
- Market Viability
- Price points
- Minimum Order quantities
We also do a little due diligence on them to go to their social media handles, see their customer feedback, and call for samples if we have to.
4. What role can startups play in preventing a country’s rich handicraft culture from fading away?
The artisans need a hand-holding approach. They have to be made digitally literate to overcome the roadblocks faced during their growth by leveraging technology's power.
Startups understand the various challenges faced by the artisans and focus on building tailor-made solutions that help boost their morale and enhance the operations of businesses.
5. What sort of demand have you witnessed for handicraft products?
45 percent of our sellers have started getting orders from North America. We have already shipped 5000 units in a matter of the last 4 months and have been receiving great feedback from both the buyers and sellers.
6. Major e-commerce players including Amazon and Flipkart are also going big in terms of products made by small artisans? How do you plan to counter the competition coming in from the big players?
We know the challenges from both the seller and buyer sides and have used our domain expertise to build that into each stage of the platform. Bluerickshaw handles end-to-end processes seamlessly both for buyers and sellers and that makes it very easy and encourages them to source from us. We work with our sellers as partners helping them realize their potential and help them understand the markets better.
The long-term vision of Bluerickshaw is to help the small manufacturers, weavers, and artisans of India expand in the international market without having to make investments in promotion or travel.
7. A major growth area in the handicrafts segments is financing, as bank financing obviously is rare for the sector. Do you plan to help the artisans in terms of making easy finance available to them from financers?
We are in talks with various organizations to provide microfinancing to sellers to fulfill huge orders. As of now, we have designed the process in a way where the seller doesn’t have to invest a lot of his own capital to fulfill an order.
The organization recently introduced credit to small buyers for up to 25,000 USD in partnership with Tazapay, a Singapore-fintech firm.
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