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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re Three!

iTasveer Tournament. Click on the image to see large version

Continuing our tradition of our yearly birthday photo (see here and here), here’s our latest. And ofcourse there’s three of us each in this one. This took almost the entire day to create. Well worth the effort I’d say.

Cheers to all of you! Thanks for being with us in this tremendous journey so far. Nothing more to say.. I’ll just part with the line – “the best is yet to come” :)

19 comments April 15th, 2009

iTasveer: A mini retrospective

Our relative silence in this space makes me feel a bit uneasy. So I just thought maybe we should throw some light on what we’ve been up to and what’s happening under the veils of this prolonged silence (mwahahaha! the evil laughter means we are onto something substantial). For those of you who don’t know us, we’re a (almost) three year old startup (or rather a small business now, three years is quite a time). But the term startup gets across the essence of our business and work culture pretty well so I’ll stick to it.

Let me put some more background to this post. Basically when we started off, we were a bunch of half learned, not too good engineers (and knew even less about running a business). Infact, that is putting it modestly.. we were outright poor in a lot of aspects (i know, yikes!). But one thing that we knew well was getting things done. So inspite of the fact that we made the poorest of design choices, we made sure everything worked well enough! And I can only say all that in retrospect as we were mighty sure we were doing things right all along at that time :) I also think that belief and confidence contributed in large parts to getting things to work as well! But as we’ve learned our crafts and business along the way, we’ve come to know that those bad decisions have started weighing us down in a lot of ways that hamper productivity/scalability of our day to day operations. We’ve also learned the various shortcomings of our service by all the generous feedback that you guys have always sent our way. We’ve continued to make incremental improvements, but we’ve grown more ambitious now and we think its time for something bigger.

Luckily we’ve put ourselves in a position where we can afford to look at everything from scratch and get to the drawing board. By the way, the lucky position being that we are an operationally profitable business now. And there’s no venture funding baggage with us yet.. so we can afford to think in a free manner about how we’d like to evolve iTasveer in the future. So admirers and haters, this might be a great time to chime in with any more feedback you have for us. We promise to listen to it all and we’ll try and make the right decisions. We promise to keep the user at the center of all our design decisions and will not hamper user experience at the cost of doing something cheaply or easily, to the best of our ability.

Work has been on on all this since the past 6 months and is moving along at a fair pace.. the new stuff will start arriving 2-3 months down the line. The changes will most likely be incremental and not a sudden unveiling. First up in line is a revamped Doodlepad.

That’s all folks.. wish us luck, and ofcourse, tell us if you have a wishlist :)

Obligatory nutty picture: Nishant and Ashish at war at one of the drawing boards.. the sketch pen is mightier than the sword

4 comments March 16th, 2009