3 May 2020
Stoned Santa : Handmade Gifts To Perfection

    We have all been in this dilemma at some point in life. Some more often than others. Picking gifts for your loved ones is in no way a cakewalk, to begin with. What do you get for them that shows them how much you care? You need to get this just right after all. Be it any occasion, picking out a sensible and meaningful gift speaks volumes about you as a person in a social setting, establishing you as a person well-versed in someone’s tastes and lets them know you put thought into their present.


    You need to be creative, you need to brainstorm. You don’t want to languish among the generic gift offerings, you need to stand out. You need to give them something personalized, and something that is well crafted for perfection. You can never go wrong with handmade gifts after all. Despite this being the era of social media domination, who wouldn’t love a portrait? But owing to the enormous time crunch we face on a daily basis, hardly anyone has the time to sit down to dedicate handcrafted architecture to someone. Let the professionals handle it in that case.


    Stoned Santa ( Don’t let the name fool you), an IIM-B incubated startup that specializes in creating personalized handmade art, portraits, sketches, among other handmade art customizable for your needs. Founded by Shashank Shekhar on December 25, 2016 to offer unique ideas handcrafted by their highly skilled team of artists to create your custom designs tailored for your needs. They offer a vast assortment of facilities like string art, caricatures, wedding gifts, and of course handmade portraits.


    Having expanded to include 100+ artists and over 2000 satisfied customers, Shashank came up with a simple yet effective model to achieve an overall ROI of about 322%. Shashank’s brainchild took off whilst in an Uber cab when he thought advertising in the cabs could significantly help boost business apart from a digital presence.


    The idea was to provide a platform for artists at the collegiate and school level a chance to expand on their art and monetize it, and earmarked 400 cabs having planned out a well-thought-out plan to give him an idea about the number of customers he could expect from this stream; to use their brochures to advertise. He saw that Bangalore airport would have the largest number of cabs present and he decided to start there. And little by little, starting with 1v1 pitches to cab drivers he convinced around 100 cab drivers in a month to set up his brochures in their cabs. It took him around 40 hours to reach his goal and it paid off eventually.


    Shashank credits the monumental success to all the helpful cabbies who readily agreed to help him out for little to nothing, merely moved by the sheer hard work he was putting in, to do something about his passion. The major takeaway from Shashank’s story would be diligence and humility can and will eventually get you anywhere you want. Just keep working on your idea. Don’t wait to perfect it, just launch. Learn and improvise along the way.



    Stoned Santa  Handmade Gifts  Customized Gifts  Gifting Startup  Startup Funding  Startup India  Investment