The itasveer Blog

An impressive sales pitch

Watch this clip from a show called “Mad Men”, set in the 60’s, around an advertising agency. I wish I could make a sales pitch like that for photobooks to all of you ;)

Add comment July 19th, 2010 Posted by Animesh

Say Hello to the brand new iTasveer.com

Hey guys, this new release has been in the works for a while and we have rebuilt it from scratch. While we have made significant improvement under the hood (which basically means you’ll won’t immediately notice them – it’s like getting your car a brand new car engine – and we don’t want to confuse you by tossing jargon like scalability etc.), we have also revamped our user interface. Here some great new features in the new iTasveer

Easier Navigation

We have a a new top navigation that gives you one-click access to your photos and products.

Simplified sharing using share pools

A fun new way to share photos with easy tor remember web addresses. Each address can have as many photos as you like.

COMING SOON – Multiple users can share photos of related events in the same pool (which is why they are called Pools!).

Shop by Design Themes

All our delicious templates, now at a glance. You can now shop by templates. Just visit our templates page and select a theme and product that fits the occasion.

The shopping cart – reinvented
A shopping cart completely rethought and designed for the complex needs of customizable products. It works well with extremely large orders as well as with small orders. So order a 1000 prints or a single coffee mug, you’ll be pleased with all the information at your fingertips. Minimal reloads, with complete pricing information is always shown. No need to press an update pricing button.

Improved workflow for photo print orders

Easier photo print ordering with size and finish selection before you add to cart. Select from our matte and glossy prints and mounts with pricing information right in the product selection pane.

COMING SOON – a larger range of paper finishes and more media like canvas, archival prints.

All Photos View

Besides the Albums view, you now have an all photos view where you can see your photos as a single stream.

A new dashboard

Our new dashboard keeps track of your last order, and the sidebar will be regularly updates with new offers and discounts tailored especially for you!

Improved order tracking
Your will now receive email updates even when part of an order is shipped. All order update emails will have tracking links embedded to directly track your order online.

Customer support, faster and better than ever
Not all changes are on the front end. We’ve also made our site administration much better and we’ll be able to handle more queries more efficiently. So we hope to answer you quickly, even on our busier days :)

Phew! We’re glad that we could make all these changes just in time for our 4th birthday! And you know what that means right? That means you are about to avail some fantastic offers on iTasveer. We’re not telling when, we’re not telling what! Just wait and watch.

4 comments April 15th, 2010 Posted by Ashish

A disruptive local courier delivery service

Given the nature of our business, we have always had to deal with couriers because of lost/delayed packages. We try and maintain these error cases to a fairly low margin, but at the same time we’ve also been eyeing this as an opportunity for a new delivery service to emerge.

We have been internally testing a new form of delivery service, and are pleased to announce that the results have been outstanding. We’re rolling out the service on iTasveer in selected cities and plan to start with the NCR region. Without further ado.. presenting the iTasveer DDS. DDS stands for dog delivery service, and we are proud to announce that we have been able to train a pack of dogs to make deliveries locally within Gurgaon.

Woofy - our mascot

Danny the dog carrying a mug safely to it's destination

Now for the juice on this. In our experiments we found that much like homing pigeons, dogs can also be trained to deliver to a particular location and return. The problems with pigeons was, that our packages were often too heavy for pigeons to carry for even short distances. The answer emerged from where we least expected it. Danny, our in house Alsatian, has always been super efficient at fetching the news paper. And the idea struck “hey.. wait a minute. if he can fetch the newspaper, can he also deliver it elsewhere”, thought Ashish. The experiments started, we tied a mug on Danny’s back and sent him off to our neighborhood residence. It worked!

So after some testing and getting convinced that this could really be a disruptive service, we’ve decided to launch it in limited locations. Let me tell you why this is so disruptive

1. It is environmentally friendly. No machines, no petrol.

2. Dogs are faster than courier trucks in heavy traffic. Or even in light traffic. Our dogs don’t have to take the road you see, they’re as comfortable offroad.

3. Dog is a man’s best friend. Who better to deliver your packages to you than your best friend.

So the next time you order from us, and see a faithful ol’ dog at your doorstep, don’t be surprised!

[update: now that we're past april 1, I just thought I'd specify that this was posted on april 1 :p]

8 comments April 1st, 2010 Posted by Animesh

Love is in the Bear!

Guys and girls, the valentine season is here and iTasveer has some great new products to help you express your love.

First, the biggie!
We are introducing super sized teddy bear for all you valentine love birds. The teddy is about 3 ft. tall and wears a t-shirt which bears your picture or message. And going by the hugs he’s getting from the girl in the picture below (thanks Bulbul for posing!), they already love it.

It’s a no-brainer girls love teddies (See What Girls Say) . Moreover even Himanshu, our design team member, fancies them and gladly poses away :P (No, he was neither threatened, nor promised any perks to do this – he willingly volunteered!)

When they say love is in the air, we say, well let’s make it a little more real – love is in the bear! So gift your valentine a super-teddy and get ready for super smiles and super hugs!

Add comment February 6th, 2010 Posted by Ashish

Missing calendar themes are back!

New year is round the corner – which means it’s a great time to make some photo calendars!

While we won’t tell you (just yet) what we have in store for you this new year, we bring you back some calendar themes that had gone missing, such as the rich black Colored Strings, the super fun Creature Creep, the paintsy Pastels and some more. Most of these are available across different calendar styles: Desk, Split, Wide and Wall.

And guess what, we give you a blog-and-social-media-exclusive offer of 15% discount on all calendars valid till 30 November. Use the coupon code CAL15OFF on the shopping cart to avail this offer.

Ready to make some calendars?

Note: Photos for this post are courtesy of Photos India.

5 comments November 25th, 2009 Posted by Ashish

Save, Serve and Sparkle !

Hey everyone, hope all of your are enjoying the Diwali week with card parties, cracker bursting sessions, meeting friends, shopping sprees or whatever you love most doing at Diwali!

Besides the unique Diwali Photo Candle and offers we have for you (which are ending soon – so hurry :) ), we recently introduced three interesting new products:

The photo personalised Piggy Bank (or गुल्लक as we call it in Hindi),

This is made of ceramic and about the size of the classic white coffee mug we sell at itasveer.

A photo tray

This one’s a wooden tray with a black finish. Your design’s printed on the metal plaque that is fitted in the centre.

and the rather unique Silver mug

This one’s a 330 ml ceramic with a silver finish.

So which one’s it gonna be? Are you going to save with the photo piggy bank , serve on a personalised tray or sip in a sparkling coffee mug?

5 comments October 14th, 2009 Posted by Ashish

Photobooks!

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re finally all set and Photobooks are ready to be shipped off the presses. It has been an almost 1.5 year long road for us, from starting thinking about them to this day. We’ve tested over half a dozen different printers, totally redesigned Doodlepad, done endless testing on the product finishes and we’re finally sure that what we’re bringing is pretty much the best in terms of quality that can be done. As of now, following are the sizes and finishes

8″x8″ Standard Square, starts @ Rs. 1399 for 20 pages (sides)

8″x10″ Standard Landscape, starts @ Rs. 1499 for 20 pages (sides)

Both sizes available with the following specifications

• Hard cover
• Perfect binding
• 170gsm gloss paper with Satin-matte lamination.

Let me just run you through the process of designing photobooks real quick (most of you who’ve already used Doodlepad will be right at home)

Step 1. Select your size and other preferences

Step 2. Select your theme and the book will load up with blank placeholders

Step 3. Select the photos you want to add from the photos panel. You can also use your Flickr and Picasa photos directly from here

Step 4. Now just start dragging and dropping photos on to the placeholders. If you don’t even want to do that, just press auto fill and let Doodlepad fill up your photos across all pages

Step 5. Add your captions. Or add whole stories. Go wild!

Step 6. Voila! Your book is ready to be printed. You can flip through the pages in the preview. Make sure you haven’t missed out and left any pages blank.

Step 7. Take out your credit card and ka’ching! Sit back, relax and let us work the magic now. We promise to awe :)

So if you’re still wondering why you’d want a photobook at all, here are a few ideas. They’re great for keeping travelogues of your trips, complete with the photos you clicked on the way. You’re a budding photographer? then these are absolutely lovely for a printed portfolio that you can conveniently carry around. You’re a parent? how about a book of your kid’s birthday. Moms.. perhaps you’d want to do your own recipe book with all the sumptuous photos of your cooking! Not to mention the great Indian wedding lends itself particularly well to be captured in such books. Or maybe just your honeymoon. Well we could go on and on about the ideas. Also if you have a custom request, do not hesitate to contact us via our contact form here.

Feedback is very much awaited as always. Happy photobooking!

10 comments September 28th, 2009 Posted by Animesh

They’re Coming!

Guys, brace yourself. We are about to launch the next big thing in photo printing: Photo Books.

If you want splendid hardbound coffee-table books with your own photos, wait no more (Okay, just a few more days) !

4 comments September 19th, 2009 Posted by Ashish

Freedom : A little sentimentality and an awesome offer.

Watching India celebrate its 62nd year of independence today, it’s hard not to be overwhelmingly thankful for the lives we lead and wonder what freedom means. There are numerous viewpoints and numerous interpretations of freedom.

Here is ours. Freedom to us so far has meant pursuing the path we choose in our lives. But we didn’t confer this freedom unto ourselves. We didn’t make the colleges we went to or the jobs that our parents had with which they paid for our education. We’re enabled by the opportunities and choices that our India has let us have. Standing on the shoulders of everyone doing their two bits to make things work, India has grown and given us a broad horizon to think and play with. Everybody working to make that deadline, or protect that two inches of land from prying enemies, or educate that child is earning all of us one more bit of freedom with every single act.

It’s not sung about but every small extra effort you put to make things work is heroic. That’s when you exercise your Freedom to make things happen.

On a lighter note, itasveer is our attempt to give you a new freedom. Freedom to gift. So we try our best to give you the most choices and the best of customizable gifts that are made especially to make somebody feel special.

Out now is our exclusive two day 15% site wide discount on the occassion of 15th August. You can use the coupon code IDAY09 to avail of this offer. Vande matram!

3 comments August 15th, 2009 Posted by Nishant

Rakshabandhan Special: Photo Personalised Rakhi

Hey guys! A lot has been happening at itasveer : starting with the release of the brand new doodlepad last week. Did you check it out? We guys really love it and I hope you have been enjoying using it too.

It’s a beta release, and we guys have been keeping track of all the feedback you are sending us. Expect a blog post on the new doodlepad soon.

In the meantime, we wanted to tell about a cool product you can buy online at itasveer this Rakshabandhan – the photo personalised Rakhi!

Along with lots of mithai, family bonding and fun (and bhaailog ending with much lighter pockets) -  make this Rakhshabandhan special with the Photo Rakhi from itasveer.

It comes in a special Rakhi pack with roli-chawal and is Rs. 99 only including shipping and taxes!

Plus, you also get free shipping on all personalised products at itasveer (except prints, mounts and collages) till 5th Aug with the discount code ‘RAKHI2009’.

So, ready to shop ?

12 comments July 22nd, 2009 Posted by Ashish