Bizongo: Case-study
Packaging as an industry is ubiquitous, used by every small medium enterprise across the table; packaging as a whole has been growing at a phenomenal rate of 15% CAGR. With over a million possible SKUs and a highly fragmented supply side consisting of over 30,000 vendors procurement of the ‘right’ packaging turns out to be a tedious task in the end. We saw a lot of potential for disruption in this industry. Print being an essential part of any packaging manufacturing process was an obvious industry for us to target along the way.

Bizongo was founded by three alumni of IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi in 2015 with the realisation that B2B trade across companies mainly happen offline and is a very tedious process. Their leadership team consists of alums of companies like Microsoft, ITC, Gravitas, Paypal, Housing.com, Snapdeal.com

Their main focus categories are food packaging, packing and shipping, packaging bags, bottles and caps, material handling and warehousing materials.

They follow the model of contract manufacturing with manufacturers, which helps us get a control on the supply side.

Again even as we are gathered here, the International Finance Corporation, the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank, has proposed to invest up to USD5 million (around Rs 32 crore) in Bizongo, an online business-to-business marketplace for packaging materials.

Bizongo operates as a B2B technology platform providing one-stop-shop packaging solutions to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large companies. The company curates, on-boards and provides access to SME packaging material manufacturers across India.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the future.

Quarterfold Case-Study
Nilesh Dhankani, CEO of Quarterfold Printabilities used to design and develop advertisements for the websites. This had happened right after my graduation in 2000.

Today, he handles 120 containers to the African market. That is, two containers a day in the past two months.

He does not own a printing plant. But he relies on a pool of printing presses

While approaching the publishers in 2014, Nilesh Dhankani talked about books from a designing point of view and the ways in which the aesthetics of the book could be improved with ideas like anti-piracy metallic foiling on the book cover or more colours and four colour illustrations inside the text pages of the books. His team started redesigning the books for the African publishers from India and it turned out to be a huge success.

Most of these books were textbooks which were getting printed in black and white. This was because of the local unavailability of four-colour machines. For four-colour printing jobs, the publishers had to print the same job for four times on a single-colour machine. Plus the paper that they would import was at a heavy price of around 30% import duty at that time. Whereas worldwide there is no import duty on textbooks.

Nilesh Dhankani works on the principle of zero rejection. Matching the delivery time that the customers expect is a difficult task for a single company to handle. We get a lot of information in advance from our customers due to the mutual trust. This enables me to know the cutoff size of paper and the inventory starts getting ready for the job that is yet to arrive. Dhankani has eight machines at various print shopfloors that are always dedicated the work. Which is how they delivered six million (60 lakh) books in a month for one of the ministries of education in Africa. This was achieved by printing in the cities all across India that were closer to the port. Quarterfold team members were stationed at the shopfloors for the whole month till the job got delivered. There wasn’t even a single copy that got rejected from the 65 to 70 containers that was delivered.

Dhankani says, There are many unorganised Indian printers who over-promise and under-deliver. Some of them resort to shortcuts to get the work done. I make it clear right from the beginning that no work will match their expectations at 100% and that there is not a single printer who will be able to do it. This transparency helps them to trust me at a personal level and which later gets extended to our business prospects.

Dhankani mentions cross-selling. he says, I had bought the rights of a storybook from one of the publishers in New Delhi for the African market. Now, it was all about cross-selling from hereon. It was a win-win situation for all of us. The publisher in New Delhi is getting paid by me since I bought the rights. The publisher in Africa is happy since the content that he is getting from me is free of cost and I do not charge for it. And I get to do the printing of this book for a lifetime since I hold the copyrights in the African market.

Creatique Case-study
This brings me to me second case study. Let me introduce you to Creatique with ops in Delhi and Mumbai.

Creatique Esporre began its journey in 2012. Amarjeet Kaur, managing director at Creatique says, "We opened the doors of the company to provide creative designs with a uniqueness of design to achieve the goals of our clients. The name Creatique is a combination of Creative and Unique." After the initial investments in wide format kit, the Fujifilm Acuity was installed in 2016.

Inderjeet Singh, the director at Creatique who is a professional architect has a very clear roadmap for the future. He says, "In the next three years, we will be among the top five Indian companies in applications, backlight and signage industry."

This is where the Acuity has benefitted Creatique. Singh said, "What changed things for Creatique was when Fuji announced they would produce thermoforming. Apart from the fact that it is high quality, it is also saving us on labour time and on materials involving lamination and sticking prints onto panels."

Singh said, "The ink has elongation properties of 300%-400% when heated, and returning to its normal state once cooled. Plus there is no crack in the product due to the Fujifilm Sericol's new ink's flexibility and ability to heat and cool without cracking or flaking."

The Creatique projects are customised for the window retail market, all the projects are challenging and there is a huge amount of client appreciation for the projects. Singh said, "Sometimes in the quality, shapes and delivery for all kinds of markets that include display graphics, signage, POS, P4P and packaging."

The key advantage, in this day and age where "everything required in two minutes", according to Amarjit Kaur is how her team is now capable of producing 1x1.5m completed panels in around 10 minutes, when previously these jobs would have taken more than 10 minutes before finishing.

Creatique has been taking on jobs requiring a variety of materials, including wood, foamex and board.

(This is the part-V of Ramu Ramanathan’s talk on a houseboat in Kochi at the session hosted by All India Federation of Master Printers and the GC members on 4 February 2018)