Fun on Sale!

If you find doormats which refuse to be treated “like a doormat” or warns you of a wife, or ‘guilt-free tissues’ made of recycled tetra pack cartons or even those ancient dish antennae shaped mosquito coil holders(whose ingenious design allows the ash to collect in the dish!), you might wonder where they came from. These are just a few out of the 120 odd products Happily Unmarried designs and markets.

Rajat & Rahul insist that their products should be fun, functional and preferably have an Indian connect.”Our word is; Jugaad”, answers Rajat on what differentiates them from other product designers. “We can make do with whatever constraints we have and still produce magic. And because we value ideas more than processes we do a lot of work using Jugaad. We make the most of whatever we have.” Apart from that, their designs also handle alcohol as a theme, and as merchandise. “We are drinkers with a design problem” replies Rajat with a chuckle, in an email interview. “We see ourselves in the business of selling fun, which is why we feel the pub is a natural extension of what we do.”“A business idea is a stupid ‘keeda’(bug), which makes you do such crazy things. It keeps you awake and then you spend all your time thinking about it. It’s exactly like falling in love. Only in this case it’s an idea you are in love with.” muses Rajat Tulli, winner of Young Creative Entrepreneur Award 2009 run by the British Council. But you may never know how and when you get smitten by the ‘keeda’. Rajat, alongside his compatriot Rahul Anand, had their encounter with it a decade ago, when the dot com bubble went bust. They were short of money with lot of enthusiasm to give their idea some shape.

The bachelors were in love with their bachelorhood! They discovered that in this family oriented country of ours, a potential market for young bachelors was not being tapped. So they decided to do it! Their vision took shape as a “one stop shop for young people living on their own”. They aimed at “providing everything from basic services, like property to fun gifts.”The young graduates from Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmadabad (MICA) had a sound advertising background to know that to stay afloat as much as anything else, they needed a good brand name. The unmarried duo racked their brains, “We wanted to capture that spirit of fun, and the minute we thought of the name we fell in love with it. Who would not want to buy a product
which says Happily Unmarried!” They instantly went to a cyber café to register the domain www.happilyunmarried.com.

Designing is not “all play and no work”. But getting designers to work for Happily Unmarried has not been a backbreaking task. “Initially the designers liked the idea because it gave them an outlet to do less serious work. Thankfully, now we are at a stage where we get 3-4 mails everyday from designers who want to work with us,” says Rajat. At Happily Unmarried, when a more established designer earns a design fee plus royalty (which means, more the products sell the more they earn) and a fresh design graduate will start at about Rs.25, 000, finding talent should be the only fuss!

Once talent is found and sent rolling, Rajat and Rahul get to work. “Our job is to brain storm on ideas, think of new product categories. Our biggest job is to insure that all products have the right amount of Happily Umarried-ness in them.” The duos no longer have a 9-to-5 work schedule. “It is fun but a lot of hard work. The day is divided equally into fire fighting, trying to meet deadlines, sending dispatches to stores all over the country.” Given their wide spread of 3 own stores, 70 stores across the metros to which they supply merchandise and their growing franchises, their job cannot be easy. Rajat also takes care of the content on the packaging of the products, the website and on the facebook fan page. Humor in writing comes naturally to this standup comedy writer-turned-entrepreneur.

Rajat, now happily married, used to write for ‘The Great Indian Comedy Show’ on television. The jack of all trades still runs half marathons to keep his dream of being associated with sports, alive. Apart from marketing fun merchandises & utilities, Happily Unmarried also organize live music events called Music in the Hills to promote live music, twice a year. The 4 editions held so far have given them considerable hype.

Yet their biggest challenge so far has been lack of funding. If the initial project for National Geographic had not happened we would not have got to see Model P (the dhobi press shaped trinket box), their first product design. But getting the project was no cake walk, as they had neither reference, nor money. “Even the final sample we showed them had 28 or 29 variants till National Geographic finally bought it,” says Rajat. The project proposal was in response to some many posters and emails they had circulated. But as they say, when the tough gets going, the going gets tough! A major heart burn later the duo realized that success wasn’t coming to them that easily.”Sometimes we would force ourselves inside offices on some other pretext and try to push our stuff. We even got chucked out of a few places because we would end up setting up a stall in the middle and everyone would abandon their work and come to us.” So a word of caution from the young entrepreneurs to younger ones, “successful businesses take a long time to build. So if you don't like what you do you are going to regret it every day.”