- [Werner Vogels] Our planets and our civilizations
are changing faster than ever before.
Join me as I travel the globe
talking to startup founders,
using technologies to make our world more interesting,
accessible, and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs that are creating
the future we will live in.
This is Now Go Build.
India is a place that is impossible
to describe in words,
it truly has to be experienced.
It has one of the longest,
uninterrupted written histories
of religion, art, culture, and politics.
It is hard for many of us to conceive of generational
traditions that have lasted well over 2,000 years.
It is almost more difficult to conceive
of those traditions disappearing in only one generation.
India's past is rich, but its bright, new future
runs the risk of erasing a way of life
for many artisans that work in age old forms.
India's growth to the most populous democracy
on the planet is astounding.
Due to our modern technological revolution
and a singular global economy.
We are witnessing one of the world's oldest societies,
morph in the historical blink of an eye
and Bangalore is largely at the center of that evolution,
the Silicon Valley of India,
it is home to many of the country's largest
technology companies,
and a booming startup community.
The gravitational pull of good pay,
modern living and joining the growing middle class
has had a profound impact on many Indian traditions,
as well as the smaller communities
where those traditions were born.
Sujay Suresh and Innu Nevatia,
founders of Zwende have dedicated themselves
to using their business and technology acumen
to ensure that traditional artisanship
remains a sustainable way to live in India.
- This village is called Nimmalakunta village,
which is in the state of Andhra Pradesh,
one of the four Southern Indian states.
There are about 70 families
that currently practice this art form.
So we'll introduce you to our first artist who is Venkatesh.
Yeah, so he's here.
- Thanks for having us here.
- So we just walk around and have a look.
And we'll explain the art form to you.
- In fact, each state like if you talk about 25 states,
across these 25 states,
there are 10,000 plus unique art forms.
- And the thing is 80% of these are dying art forms.
- If they continue to practice these art forms,
the way they've been done centuries earlier,
or for centuries,
it's no longer palatable for the modern day consumer.
Therefore, it's very, very important
to take it to people so make it more accessible.
And we give it a form that more and more people
in the current age like.
- [Sujay] So Zwende is solving for the creative supply chain
in India,
what we realized is that these art forms
and artisans have infinite creativity,
but limited resources.
- [Innu] So we work with artisans,
we digitize their inventory of products and designs.
And within this portfolio,
people can mix and match
and create their own combinations of designs.
That combination is sent back to the artisans
and they would physically handcraft it and make it
and then that would be delivered to the customer.
- Tell me a bit more about your onboarding
because that seems like it's not a self service process.
It's a heavyweight process.
- Yeah, When we onboard a designer,
we are trying to understand what's the story,
what's the inspiration behind what they do.
So we create a page, you know, for them,
where we talk about their background,
their storyline, all of that.
And we also do the photography
and the modularization and digitization.
I would say our dream would be to enable artisans
in the remotest of villages in India to create things
for people that truly matches their style and taste.
So this is parchment leather,
and the art form is called tholu bommalata
or leather puppetry.
So, what they used to do in about 200 BC
is that they would paint life sized puppets,
which would depict different characters
from Hindu mythology.
And as you can see, these have been colored
with really bright colors.
So that's the traditional art form.
- [Venkatesh] And because the leather is translucent,
and puppet shows are a dying art form,
they extend themselves well, to lampshades.
So if you see what she's painting right now,
it's using the same art form on parchment leather,
but what she's painting is a lampshade.
But they still use very traditional motifs,
very traditional colors and traditional designs.
So we'll just take you to another place
that shows you some finished lampshades.
- Okay. - So you'll get an idea
of how it sort of looks.
Yeah.
Yeah. - Okay.
- So you see, these are all hand painted.
Yeah.
- So it's wet.
- Intricate yes,
yeah.
- Wonderful.
So how many people actually are in the village
that are living off this art form?
- So there are about 70 families
that actually practice this art form right now.
It used to be a lot more before.
And so you can see outside every home
there are people who sit and work through the day.
And these families migrated into this village
and became a smaller community.
- So there weren't 70 families here originally.
- No, so about 1,500 years back,
they migrated from Maharashtra.
- Okay.
- To Andhra Pradesh we are currently in
the state of Andhra Pradesh.
And that's how they came here and they started
practicing the art form over here.
(in foreign language)
- That's the starting point.
- Yeah, the black and white.
So you can see that bamboo stick,
so they make a small slit, they make it sharp,
like a pen, and then they dip in natural dye
and they do the painting.
- Okay.
- So here you see a different form
and size of the lampshade.
So there's a lot of creativity that these guys have
and it's just a question of how do we bring it to market
so that it's more consumable.
- So it's about the information given
that they're not tech savvy.
This is that you give them
so that they can start to optimize their business.
- So from day zero,
we had a feedback loop that we built for our designers,
we help them predict not only what ready inventory
they should hold,
but also what raw inventory they should get.
Similarly, we try and tell them what works
in different parts of the country.
So we tell them,
hey, you know what the market is looking for these products,
these are doing well.
Your art form can be easily extended to these.
So we think you should launch and every time
we have used this kind of data analytics
to launch a product,
we've seen it become a best seller.
- I think it's very important to look at data.
You know, look at not just what you want to offer,
but what customers want, listen to them.
And if you can figure out a scalable
and a structured way to pass that
feedback back to your designers,
I think you only create more and more
of what customers want.
- I wanted to see Zwende's workshop space.
Here, they demonstrate how to adopt
the traditional art forms to create more lifestyle products
and broaden the market for this work,
and how they use data to predict what will sell.
- We show you how modularization of design works.
So these are different designs
that are available on the website.
- Okay. - Right.
And the same design goes on,
let's say, this kind of a product,
it could go on this kind of a product,
or it could go on this kind of a product.
- That's really to minimize the amount of inventory
that you need to hold in exchange for expediency
of shipping and accuracy.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- So it's a careful balance,
What are these things on top here?
- So these are the frames that are used to make
the lampshade with the same artwork which is this.
So this is the tholu bommalata.
So this is what is hand painted on leather,
which goes on bags or it goes on frames.
So again, that's the sort of modularization
that we have done, because it's the same size of artwork
and design that gets wrapped on a lamp
or goes on a bag.
And so again, the risk of holding
that artwork as raw inventory is diversified
across a lampshade, and a variety of bags.
- And again, given the modular nature,
we are now getting different artists
to give different forms of art that can be used in this bag.
So with modularization, again,
we can increase the depth of the skills
with many different art forms.
- [Werner] So you mentioned earlier when we were walking around
about that sort of younger generations
expect something different from unique products.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So if you see just around us, this is this art form
and its most traditional heritage form,
which is you know, life-sized puppets
or wall art and not too many people
in the younger generation would appreciate
something always which is so traditional and so colorful.
So Zwende works with boutique designers,
these are typically design schools students
who in turn work with artisans
to train them to contemporize their art
and make it more palatable for the current day consumer.
- And that makes you way more beyond
just a marketplace.
- Absolutely.
And actually create new forms of the art
Okay, so artisans more are from villages
like this,
where the designers are more urban?
- Urban women, yes, absolutely.
You know, one of the things that gets us to work
every single day, and that excites us the most is,
you know, being able to empower women.
With us following a made to order model.
We've been able to empower a lot of these women
entrepreneurs and sort of bring them into this online
ecosystem and enable them to have consistent income.
So, before Zwende, their point of sale
was two flea markets a year, but now they have sustainable,
consistent monthly incomes,
thanks to revenues and business that's coming from Zwende.
- While India's fast growing economy
has been a boon for many,
only 14% of the entrepreneurs in India are women.
Zwende has set her sights on raising that number.
Thank you for letting me into your house.
Can you show me this?
- [Shamli Das] Yeah.
So this is a nameplate, which I'm doing for Zwende.
So I choose the colors, I make some variety of designs.
Then I put these designs on the paper.
- So you put them on the Zwende website?
- Yes.
- Oh, they do it for you.
- They do it for me.
I just have to do this.
And this, that's it.
- Okay.
- They take it up after that.
- Okay.
And how do the, the things that you make,
how do they get to your customers?
Does Zwende take care of that or?
- Absolutely, yes.
So every day there's a shipping guy.
Who comes at 4 and they pick up the orders for the day.
And my thing is just to keep it ready
before the deadlines.
- So how digital savvy do you need
to be to interact with Zwende?
- I get a message.
And then the all the details are there on the screen.
So I just have a look and I start with it.
- Okay.
- So I just have to focus on my work.
- Is this enough to make a business out of?
- It is getting better every year for me.
- Okay, good.
- Like, the orders are quite regular.
And its kind of given me financial stability too.
- So it must be, I mean,
suddenly you have a platform that can
for all of India, and maybe even beyond India.
So how does that make you feel as an artist?
- I think it's very nice
when people start appreciating something
which comes from my own country,
and something which I have done.
It's a great feeling.
- If you have, let's say about 60
to 70 different attributes at a merchandise
level for your skills,
and then you have so many different attributes
for your customers.
And then they're taking so many different
journeys on the website, the real question is,
how do you place the right product
in front of the right customer at the right time.
Today, a large part of it is based on collaborative
filtering you know.
- It works.
Kind of.
- People who like this also like this,
and then you do a look-alike on that.
So that's one.
The second is that because we track user journeys,
and not just events at an aggregate level on the website,
we know that when a user is taking a particular journey,
you know, this user is more likely
to convert at this product.
And that when a new user comes on the website,
and we don't know any historical information
about them, we'd use the journeys
and some collaborative filtering
to eventually recommend you know what they would want
- I think at Zwende we can confidently say
that over 80% of our customers today,
we have actually had a conversation with
to understand not only why they bought,
but why they didn't buy or what would make them buy,
- which is crucial if you want your recommendations to work.
- Absolutely, yeah.
one of the taglines we started Zwende with
was that our AI is 2,500 year old, right?
- So we basically bake in the nuances in the rules
of the art form.
And let's assume, you know for simplicity's sake,
that you have a lampshade and the lampshade has two parts,
two sides, you know,
if a user selected a black and white on one side,
and the artisan or the designer says that,
hey, you know what, with black and white,
I'm only going to allow people to use black and white
because if you mix it with other colors,
that does not preserve the ethos of the art form.
So as you navigate and as you try to design,
the million choices eventually get narrowed down
into a fewer number of choices for the user to also have
confidence that hey, what I've created looks good.
- And actually there's another reason,
I think, especially in your particular case
with so many different product attributes,
that some people took the Paradox of Choice.
- Yeah.
- That if you only have three choices,
it's easy to choose.
Are you happy with your choice
if you have 500 choices?
- Yes.
- You may still choose the same thing.
- Yes.
- But you may have this lingering thing your head
going like, maybe,
maybe its not the right one,
so people are less happy.
with the same choice
- Yeah.
And so collaborative filtering
really helps you with just servicing,
limiting the choice and making people
more happy with their choice.
So tell me a bit about sort of how is your team built up.
is this all technologists or, I mean,
or are these artisans themselves?
Or tell me a bit about your team?
- Okay.
So, in fact, the technology is something
that we don't have in house yet.
And it's thanks to cloud services.
It's thanks to outsource technology partners
that we have been able to find to build the technology.
- So in essence, you're the prototypical
built on the cloud startup.
In that sense, the only people you have in house
are not focused on technology at all.
- Yes, absolutely.
- And so that's your purely basically spending
all your money on the things that matter
and building a better product.
- Absolutely.
And 100% it's only been possible
because we have these partners
and ready solutions that we can build this on top of.
- Okay, wonderful.
Stop watching me.
One thing that really struck me was
that when we started building AWS,
we really started building a platform
so that others could focus on the kind of things
that they really wanted to do.
Yeah,
I mean, you guys don't want to be in IT.
Now you want to be a platform for artists.
And what I've seen with you is that you
actually do exactly the same thing that AWS do.
You provide a complete managed service environment
for artists, so that they don't have to think
about customer acquisition,
they don't have to think about shipping,
they don't have to think about supply chain.
And so in essence,
I see you guys as a nice layer,
similar to AWS as an artist cloud service.
Yeah.
- And I think you've hit the nail on the head
with our passion turning into business.
It's amazing that you you call it an artist cloud service.
And I think that's something that we are going
to latch on to.
- So I actually have a question for you, Werner.
You've seen what we've done.
You've built Amazon for so many years,
what would you advise us in terms of things
that we should avoid doing?
- I think, if I look back at all the mistakes
and whether it's me or whether we as Amazon did,
it's always mistakes of omission.
Things that you think you should have done,
but you put it off.
Yeah.
And as such, I think, you know,
whenever something comes to you
a gut feeling says we should be going after this.
Do it.
Just make it an experiment.
Yeah, see what happens.
Yeah, try to keep it as lean and as mean as possible.
And pretty quickly, you'll know whether there's,
whether there is something there.
So whenever your gut says, this might be good,
but your mind your head says, maybe next year,
do it now.
It is no surprise that I believe in
the power of technology to change things for the better.
Our ability to innovate and create and connect
has resulted in the most amazing advances in human history
and there's no end in sight.
But with every advance, every gain in efficiency
or connectivity, there's always the risk
of leaving something behind.
Some of these things are precious.
Here in Nimmalakunta is just one example of technology
making it possible to save an art form
that may have been lost, an art form that supports
the precious thing a town, a community,
a family.
(upbeat music)