Xtees.com – A Unique t-shirt selling hub

Last week was quite interesting as I spent most of my time fiddling around with testing and installation of Drupal on local network. I would give an overview of it in the near future.
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About Xtees.com
I also spoke with Sam from xtees.com which is an online hub for t-shirt selling. When I first took a look at xtees.com, I told myself here is another competitor to the likes of Myntra’s, Gnome’s (now Inkfruit), Pringoo’s and others. But as Sam told me there’s a subtle difference in what xtees.com is and in what it is trying to achieve! Operating from Tirupur (India’s t-shirt junction), Xtees.com has been active in the t-shirt selling space for about 5 years now (older than any of the current startups in this space).

Primarily it is serving Indian customers and till date has managed a base of roughly 200,000 customers. The key differentiators are that Xtees.com is into ‘screen printing’ and has it own t-shirt brands. So there isn’t any tie-up that has happened. Primarily they stock a lot of plain and professional printing t-shirts. However, Xtees.com has also partnered with rediff, storeguru and futurebazaar for its sales.

Team
The team@Xtees is quite small and consists of only 4 people. Despite a small team special emphasis is given to efficient customer-servicing. The CEO acts as the customer-interface and politely responds to all the customer interfaces. Most importantly if you don’t get a t-shirt of your choice you can always return it back to Xtees.com

Marketing
Xtees.com gets a lot of repeat customers and its marketing efforts are essentially restricted to offline tactics. For e.g. they always send special post-cards to their customer pool after every six months or so. Going by Sam’s words ‘Xtees.com is a unique example of a successful online-brand which is continuing to do well without any online marketing efforts’. What are your thoughts on such models? Do you think that brands like Xtees.com do not require special marketing efforts (online/offline) primarily because of the reputation that they’ve established in the industry?
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Zemanta: A blessing in disguise for bloggers?

We’re all aware of the relevance of meaningful tags & hyperlinks that need to be inserted in a blog-post. While writing a blog-post a bloggers needs to spend time & effort thinking about appropriate tags which would make it easy for other bloggers to locate the blog-post.

A powerful plugin from Zemanta enables bloggers to focus on ‘writing’ while it takes care of their hyperlinking, images and tagging needs.

Customer Service : Sorry what’s that ?

Scenario 1
“Son, may I request you to kindly keep this bag of biscuits over your counter for sometime?”.
“Why”, asked the shopkeeper. “Son, I have to purchase some milk from the dairy”, she said.
Shopkeeper’s answer – A big “NO”. … and the old lady walks away.

I was standing alongside the old lady and asked my self. Is this humanity? Probably customer service comes after that. Can some teach “dear” shopkeeper the art of effectively treating his customers.

Scenario 2
In upmarket area of South Delhi a popular Internet Service Provider operates at the mercy of rain gods. Rain pours and the internet simply goes off.

Rain is over but the customer’s misery with internet continues. This time it is a squirrel bite. Poor customer has no luck what-so-ever even with his plans to change to a new connection. Another service provider has customers inside 100 metres from his house but not at his place.

The angry customer goes to his connection provider’s office and starts complaining. He’s in for a rude shock as the roles are reversed this time, and the local provider shouts at him, shouts badly.

Probably it’s time we tell them something about treating their customers as now they only say onething “Customer Service: Sorry what’s that?”

(http://www.xbhp.com/autopictorials/data/543/shop1.jpg)

Discussion forums still alive..

Continuing from my last post on Web hosting ( trying to focus a bit on tech. these days …..)

My quest for a good web-host landed me at several websites, blogs and discussion forums. A lot of them appeared to make quite a few promises.

Although the evolution of blogs has re-defined the art of conversations good old php forum continues to run well despite stuff competition. Popular MBA discussion groups like pagal guy, cool-avenues, job forums, web directories, scripts and other talks are still pretty much a part of traditional discussion forums. The biggest advantage of such forums is presence of moderators.

Why these forums work ?

Pretty interesting, the other day two members were banned in one of the discussion forums. Reason? The reason these guys joined in, one of them who was hunting for a job asked a funny question how to search for a job and the other one almost instantly replied by naming one job portal.

The results both of them were banned for spamming the forum. That’s the power of discussion forums. The other advantage with access to several good guys you can ask them questions, you can complain and do quite a few things.

(Image source http://sharing.mayer-johnson.com/images/index_discussion.jpg)

Web Hosting demystified – I

I’ve been running my blog on wordpress.com which offcourse is a free account currently. In the future, I plan to shift my blog to a domain on a wordpress.org account.

The other day I was doing a bit of search (organic search) for a cheap, reliable, quality (wow i.e. quite a bit) web-hosting provider. Did a bit of research, read some e-mails in my discussion group, talked to a couple of net experts ( not geeks but domain pros).

After some brain-storming I discovered a kool webhosting company called Velnetweb which seems to be one stop shop for all web hosting needs. Velnetweb offers web-design and wide variety of domains at cheap prices for 2 years.

My buddy gave a bit of positive feedback about Velnetweb and is quite satisfied by their service and has a hosted domain at Velnet for the last couple of years. What I look about Velnet is the ability to use wordpress.org themes which makes them quite cool.

Velnet shows a lot of promise and is best-fit solution if you are looking for a cost-effective domain hosting solution. The Velnet guys are based out of UK and offer 24 hour phone support. The future looks bright for Velnet if it continues to fulfill its promise of quality 🙂

All I can say at this point of time that they are creating a bit of wave by their price surely long way to stand up and be counted.

(Image source : Host Designs)

Myntra.com CEO speaks

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Myntra.com CEO & co-founder, Mukesh Bansal. So here is his journey in his own words…………..

Background
I worked for a consulting company, Deloitte consulting and I worked for them for 2 years. Then for the last 8 years I worked for 4 different start-ups in Bay area, California all early stage companies, couple of enterprise software companies and couple of e-commerce companies.I’d been looking at the whole environment in India, whole landscape was changing the economy was doing so well and opportunities arising.

I needed to do something and I got convinced that India was the right place to do it. I realized that e-commerce was going to be pretty significant in India for the next 4-5 years. Basically, you know based on lot of facts, lot of data I live to the whole dot com boom in Bay area then I came to know about Cafepress which has got a similar business in US. I got convinced that there is a decent potential for it in India and that non-else is doing it. Last september I started collecting a lot of data and facts and figures.

So that’s where the early seeds of the business came from.                                     Over the last few months I started doing some market research, I started working on this in August-September and moved to India full time in November.

People started joining steadily and we’ve grown to a team of 15 today. We’ve a development of about 4 people team. The marketing team looks after website content, we’ve our own operations for some of the products we do production in-house and for some we outsource.

The concept of Myntra
Anyone is looking for a unique gift, they have a great idea and they want to do something on their own they can come to Myntra website and based on our library of designs they can find something interesting or they can use our online tools to create an interesting design. In a nutshell, myntra should help anyone who is looking to have a unique product.

We are investing most of our effort in building a good robust search.

Restriction – Specific categories for mugs and t-shirt
It is a limitation, it is in the road-map we’re looking at a guideline to counter this. We are trying to come up with a strategy where we would let the designer have the flexibility of selecting his design for mug, t-shirt or anyother product.

Similar services
Only 1 service Dilsebol appears similar which has the concept to publish the design.

Designs
The concept of myntra.com i.e. designs are uploaded by users as well as myntra.com team.

Myntra.com works for designer
For each instance of a sale of a designer’s design he earns 10% of sale.

Future activities & marketing strategy
We’re planning a series of big activities during the month of September probably during the first couple message. Future marketing strategy would revolve around colleges, conducting design contests in design schools. Primarily marketing is offline and there hasn’t been much of focus on online campaigns. Also Myntra is in the process of establishing affiliates.

Myntra’s Core message “Myntra is a place to find unique design and gifts”