Facilitating creative growth & community
Overview
With societal pressure, many Indians pursue traditional careers, but a few attempt at turning their creative passion into a career. The journey of such creative entrepreneurs is lonely, difficult and doesn't garner much support. Stappu emerged as omni-platform that increased communal support, individual presence & ultimately business growth for these Artists.
Role
Design Director
Read about it in the News
The Economic Times,
Your Story,
BitBusiness,
InsightsSuccess,
LiveMint
A profitible service that built a creative community by supporting Artists offline through events, mentors & forums; and online on Stappu's platform through portfolio development, telling their story & collaborations.
We found an area of opportunity when artists found it difficult to maintain a digital presence, felt alone during the earlier days and most importantly did not have the means to invest or did not realize the importance of creating their portfolio.
Areas of Opportunity: Digital Presence, Online & Offline Communal Support & Portfolio Creation
From our built offline community of 500 artists, from musicians to painters to chefs, Stappu built an online platform and service with handpicked artists to increase their digital reach and in the future to facilitate global collaboration among budding artists. The first category we tackled was food, one of the most untraditional forms of art in India.
1. Discover
Artists discover Stappu online, through word of mouth or by Stappu reaching out to them.
2. Meet
If it seems to be a fit, they have a one on one with a Stappu member.
3.Build
Stappu goes to the Artist's space to verify and create their portfolio.
4. Launch
The Artist's portfolio is up and running on the website. They keep all images from the photoshoot.
5.Collaborate
The Stappu collective holds offline events and meetups. They also participate in other events together.
6.Grow
Buyers can buy off stappu.com. Artists are also connected to larger companies.
The initial research and validation started from analyzing existing platform solutions and talking to people, either artists or buyers at tradeshows. We continued research for the first three months using a few methods listed below.
• Administered cross sectional surveys & contextual interviews
• Identified target audiences and created user personas/job stories
• Conducted competitive market research, user testing & speed dating
Below is the impact a year after launch.
"Being able to share my experiences and learn from others already makes this journey more exciting"
"With a 12 years of experience and a substantial business I was just excited to join and provide resources for people starting off"
"At Stappu it is the Artist, and not the product, which is at the forefront"
Stappu was co-founded by my business partner Jeevika Tyagi and I. As the creative and operations head I wore many hats. For this service design piece, I spearheaded the design and strategy, built the portfolios and conducted most of the in-person research. The responsibility of building the community, ongoing research and conducting events was shared. I managed a team of 4 for the operation side of things.
Happy to talk about this in more detail if interested - shoot me an e-mail at kanika.khosla@gmail.com