Sidhartha Meka and Raghu Seelamsetty were excited to build their dream homes, but little did they know about the products, service providers, best practices and time involved in it. Sidhartha recalls, “When we were building our spaces, we found ourselves spending a lot of time trying to find building products, learn how they should be installed.” Being first-time home builders and someone who lacked deep knowledge about building materials, they were looking for one simple platform that could provide such information.
Why did they start Wishkarma?
Few of the challenges that they faced were lack of information about locally available products and suppliers, non-availability of price validation and credible service providers, incorrect time estimates for project completion and so on. Both co-founders agree that these problems could be solved as they recollect that, “Unlike a decade ago, most of the world’s leading brands have their presence in India now. Many are available via their dealer representatives locally or somewhere in India. Finding out who they are and which product might work best for you is challenging.”
The other aspect that they had to deal with was to catalogue ideas and communicate the same to architects and interior designers. Product recommendations were very biased. Due to lack of transparency, they had to rely completely on word of mouth suggestions. After shortlisting the products, they faced the next level of challenge, which involved installation and after sale services. In this context, Raghu recalls his experience, “We ended up watching YouTube videos on those products and tried to understand how they should be installed and the maintenance challenges around them.”
To address this array of challenges, the founders came together and built Wishkarma.com, a research platform with a searchable product catalogue for architects, home builders, interior designers and design consultants.
Team WishkarmaIndian consumer’s challenges & Wishkarma’s solution
The Wishkarma team added many international brands and indigenous home solutions to the platform. Prior to this cohesive solution, availability of products was scattered across the geography of India. Traditionally, for many of these products, the only source of information was word of mouth or printed product manuals.
Gradually, Indian ecommerce companies tried to fill these gaps by providing home décor solutions. However, this did not completely solve the problem of finding local products and suppliers. Many of them remained inaccessible to the Indian consumer
Filling the above gaps, Wishkarma offers a catalogue of products across categories like electronic appliances, paints, tiles and ceramics, kitchen ware, bathroom accessories, construction materials, furnishings & fittings and more. It also includes a directory of service providers like architects, interior designers and home solution providers. It doesn’t stop there.
To further simplify the process of home building, the platform has an in-built library of resources with how-to guides, products reviews and project implementation ideas. Also, the chat feature reduces consumers’ time to physically visit stores and connects them with vendors immediately.
Wishkarma, digitizing product catalogue for home owners
Wishkarma is a research platform to discover products, suppliers and manufacturers, architects, ideas and resources for home builders and architects. They have added 11,000 products from over 1000 brands and are building a collaborative platform to enrich this community.
Sidhartha Meka shares their vision for Wishkarma, “Our goal is to empower our consumers to make informed decisions as they look to build the home of their dreams.” The team is now working towards transforming this platform into a community that can house not just suppliers and products, but also tools that would drive consumer decisions. Read more about Indian Startups.
Website – http://www.wishkarma.com
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