Paper Rocket Studio
Sahruday Vishwanath
Tell me something new, so I know how much of this world I don't know.
What if you could use your knowledge, skill, and most importantly your interest to explore making various products of different materials and so on? Yes! this is exactly what Sugama Gopalkrishna is doing.
She is the founder of Paper Rocket Studio.
She did her studies in the field of Visual communication design and majored in Graphic Design. Back in 2014, she started to explore what she could do, and by putting her interests together, she felt that she needed to make art and do it in a way that was tangible and could be felt. Thus, came about the thought of putting her illustrations onto products.
She started doodling and working on little projects and then eventually moved to print designs on products like notebooks, boxes, furnishings, and more recently, clothing.
She started back in 2016 organically when she was in Sri Lanka and slowly grew to retail there at pendi.lk, barefoot as well as the design collective.? While she did all this fueled by interest and passion, in 2023, she decided to not take a passive approach but to start to seriously analyse the business side of her work. She says that passion can keep you making beautiful work, but the revenue is essential to sustain it. Thus, her decision to work on the business dynamics came about.
She looks to explore various materials and processes of printing to create new products for every collection. Each of her collections has different types of products with a similar aesthetic. She casually says that consistency is not something that she looks for in terms of repeating her product line although - the market might demand it. Some say consistency is the key, well Sugama reminds me of a quote by Yuval Noah Harari, “Consistency is the playground of a dull mind”, I think she resonates with that. But the interest and passion are the consistencies she holds onto and not the product line as such. And in ways more than one, if these underlying elements are sturdy, it lays the foundation for anything above.
With this occasional change in her product offerings, she looks at her business as a design studio rather than a manufacturer of myriad designed products. She is also a freelancer and undertakes projects relating to areas like designing gifts among others. She believes that she works on capitalizing on the concept of DaaS: Design as a Service!
While her journey has made her design various collections of products every season, she says that it is imperative to work on figuring out how the model can be improved for the business.
She is a mom too, (Happy Belated Mothers’ Day to all of them out there!!!). This she says curtails the amount of time she can dedicate to her work and needs to mine out time for the things she plans. Time being very limited, to explore newer areas and to invest in the business, translates into squeezing out additional time from the usual. To reduce the load that she bears and share it, she is actively looking for a team in her journey. She expresses concern that the potential partners and the team must share the same passion and wavelength that she does, which is the most important element that could make any business soar or otherwise.
领英推荐
She says that to be on the journey of running a small business, it is essential to have a support system that has your back and lets you explore. It could be your family or your other line of work. It is through exploration that we find out our strengths. We also should be willing to go through the lows in the beginning and not expect any great returns when we just start out. It is all about managing your investment and waiting for the ratios to start working in your favour.
She creates her designs using Illustrator, Photoshop, and Pro Create.
She says having a curious and learning nature helps increase knowledge in any field and in today’s world, it is not desirable to stop growing in your field, but to master of all aspects of it. Else, we tend to get stagnant, she exclaims.
On talking about her future plans, she says that converting her work into digital assets and selling them online is something she might consider, given the booming market and the growing sector for the same.
I asked her what she felt was the hardest thing for any small business owner in India. She says that in our price-sensitive market, people fail to fairly value what they receive. She says that it then becomes hard to get across what value you are imparting and people often are price-conscious and not necessarily value-conscious. Vendors hike their prices assuming that you get a large chunk of the pie and buyers bargain, unable to value what is being provided. Between them both, you struggle to communicate and get value for what you make from scratch. She believes it is a pain point that needs to be solved.
We make little, we lose little, it is all a risk.
So, I finally asked her the 3 tips she would give to aspiring entrepreneurs.
And that was my 30 minutes with Sugama Gopalkrishna , Founder of Paper Rocket Studio.
Thank you so much!