Let us Kreeda Today!

Blog 21 of 30

(Long Blog Alert!)

So, a new era in Masterpage began with Kreeda. I had never done anything like this before nor did I know anyone who had done anything like this, so it was learning from the word go.

Board games essentially have four elements, the board, the game pieces, the rules, and the packaging. Now the most obvious way to print the board was on cardboard. So, our earliest games were printed on cardboard. We had to make game pieces but decided to limit our exposure to manufacture. Our earliest games had beautiful shells of different shapes and colours to be used instead of the game pieces. Dice we had to make or buy as the game required it. And then came the packaging.

Since our earliest games were one foot square, we needed boxes large enough for them. I was breaking my head over what to do, until one evening, we ordered pizza. The boxes were the perfect size for my games. The next day, I managed to call up somebody who made these boxes. These were the early pizza boxes with ugly large staples in the corner, but I had to make do. The challenge for small businesses is volume.

I remember talking to a carton manufacturer hoping he would customise a carton for me.

“Depends on the volume,” he said curtly.

“Ummmm…. what kind of volume are you looking for?” I asked diffidently.

“Ten or twenty,” he said dismissively like he never believed I could do that much.

A new confidence came to me. “I need fifty,” I said and when on to give him specifications on quality and timelines. He listened with the greatest of respect until… I realised I was talking in units and he in thousands. He was looking at 50 thousand cartons!

The look of sheer contempt he gave would have been insulting if I had not burst out laughing! I found it hilarious that we had had a serious business discussion for half an hour both speaking, what amounted to, different languages.

So, it was pizza boxes for me. We got them in brown and printed them in the characteristic red and yellow colours of Kreeda. We put in the board, we put in the rules and put in the game pieces. These were rattling around in this large box. What to do? I had a eureka moment and decided on a draw string bag for the game pieces, and our first set of games were ready to go!

For the pallanguzhi, we searched the temple streets and found someone who made them. It seemed simple enough to pick them up put them in a large drawstring bag along with the game pieces and the rules. But when I examined the pallanguzhi closely I realized the quality was so bad. The nails were rusting, the hinges were loose, and the pits were rough. So, we had a carpenter to smooth them down, change the nails and the hinges. Then we had them painted to look bright and cheerful. By the time all this was done, and the cowrie shells were added, the cost of the pallanguzhi had escalated.

For the first time I was seeing things not as a buyer, but as a manufacturer and how every little, tiny thing impacted the cost of a product. I never complained any more when I went to buy something. I learned that there is a price to everything.

The rules were easy enough, but I insisted on playing the games hundreds of times in the office to iron out all issues with the rules. Then we had our games ready, and I had to figure out how to sell them.

A dear friend, the vibrant and lovely Mathangi Srinivasamurti, a young woman with a vision, ran a store called Crafts and Weaves. It was a unique idea at the time selling a truly wonderful collection of products and a landmark of sorts in the city.  She was ready to place the games in her store. Gita Ram, a mentor and guide, and a promoter of crafts, loved the games and put them in the Design Store.  But this was not enough. These were niche stores and I wanted something more… democratic?

I chose to barge into the office of Ashwin, who ran the Odyssey store in Chennai. He saw me walking in with four cartons and said, “I didn’t order pizza.” To this day I remind him of it. But once he saw the games, he fell in love with them and has supported Kreeda ever since.

So, I had my games, and I had my retailers. The next step was to send them out. Here I ran into other speed bumps. I had no idea how to do my invoicing. I didn’t know about sales tax; I didn’t know about the procedures. When someone called asking for a DC, my first question was, “What is a DC?” The only DC I knew was DC comics. I learned that day that it was a Delivery Challan!

I didn’t even know to set aside the retailer margin. In fact, that is a mistake I realised later. And it took us years of pricing corrections to get that right.

But the games were in the store. I was fortunate to have the support of so many people. Yet another person, Chitra Mahesh, a senior and respected journalist and role model, who grew to be a very close friend of mine, ran an article on August 22, 2012 in The Hindu talking about what we were doing.

On that day with that one article by her, Kreeda went from being the whim of a young woman trying to find meaning in her life to an actual product. Because we sold out within a week. This was not something I was expecting. I had to run around trying to find replacements, figure out what to do and how to manufacture more games.

Over the years, many things changed in our designs, many things changed in Kreeda. The story of Kreeda is an exciting one, with highs and lows, cheers, and tears. But this series of blogs is not the story of Kreeda. It is the story of Masterpage. So, while Kreeda became the soul of Masterpage, many other exciting things happened too. But for that you have to wait till tomorrow!