1981-82Two students at National College, Bengaluru. They were born in the same hospital and went to the same college, and still did not know each other.
1992They meet, and Rashmi has to correct the date on air. After marrying they went to Singapore to work for a Chinese company that wanted to do something with India, which took them into Vishwa, a Karnataka state handicraft project. The artisans they met made excellent product and had no idea what a barcode, an inner or a master carton was. Harish spent much of that period teaching packaging and presentation rather than buying.
2004Back to India with two fixed ideas. Work that rural women could do with their hands, and the scrapbooking culture they had seen in the west. They picked handmade flowers in local recycled cotton paper precisely because the work needed skill and no machinery. Behind them was Australian retail, wholesale, a chocolate factory, and a 720-store discount group that never ran discounts because it already priced everyday-low like Walmart.
2004-06Export first, and it nearly ends there. They sold a house in Melbourne and put the money into the first order, and that customer went bankrupt before paying. A UK buyer named Stuart, whom they still call the saviour, took the business on. Export worked because an impressed customer pays an advance, while retail eats capital they did not have.
2005-12Craft goes quiet in India. The founders read the period as the internet era, when people were forgetting how to make things with their hands. Stationery shops were the only source of craft material, and Rashmi went store to store hunting supplies for her children's school projects.
2007A store in Bengaluru that nobody understood. Opening day was friends and family and the next day was nobody. The curious came in, assumed the colour-coordinated papers were imported, and had no clue what to do with them, so the founders started teaching scrapbooking in apartment workshops. A third year of export growth paid for the shop, not an investor.
2007-14Seven years of being the wrong shop. Kids' bangles, fashion jewellery, gift ware, a bit of Archies and a bit of everything, to lure people in and explain the real category once they were inside. The pricing came from copying the export markup: a customer bought at 50 cents and retailed at five dollars abroad, so they tried it and became simply overpriced with a handmade back end to support. The customers ended the argument by telling them they were a DIY store and had no business selling finished goods.
2015-22Investors knock and are turned down. Thirteen or fourteen factories in poor parts of Karnataka were unreadable to funds that had no corporate team they could send in to understand them. Impact funds came later and were declined too, because corporatising would disturb a rural ecosystem that had established itself. The model was simplified instead, into seven bigger centres.
Today3,000 women, 38 stores, 120 million flowers a year. Plus two stores inside Smartworks offices, 400 retail staff, a warehouse team of about 120, and 10,000 SKUs of which they make seven or eight thousand. American retailers audit and certify the factory, and one buyer switching to lead-free or FSC-only can collapse a workforce, so the certification work is existential. Plans for 100 and then 200 stores are on hold until June or July while the existing stores are optimised, and corporatisation, perhaps an IPO, is finally on the table.
