MERAK — A life full of creativity
Pakistan has a rich and diverse history of handicrafts. Every city has its own handicrafts specialty ranging from fabric, material, embroidery, to jewelry, carving, mirror work and other handicraft items. Each color, style, design and motif carries with it a unique symbol portraying the culture of that particular area and builds on people’s indigenous skills. Pakistani handicraft is the integrated part of the Pakistani culture leaving the whole world amazed and itching for more. And all the credit goes to these beautiful crafters or creators who work day and night to create such an amazing art work.
But we observed that these large numbers of people belong to villages and other rural areas where they have limited resources and a platform through which they can showcase their talent and earn recognition.
So we group of eight fellows came up with an amazing solution and would like to initiate an online platform named MERAK as a one stop shop of products produced by the cottage industry. Through this platform we will help them to showcase their work to earn recognition as well as to set up a target customer segment for this industry by making their products easily accessible across Pakistan as well as to grab attention of international buyers thus, creating job opportunities in this sector.
The concept and meaning behind Merak is that it is derived from a Greek word meraki. The modern Greeks often use it to describe doing something with soul, creativity, or love — when you put “something of yourself” into what you’re doing, whatever it may be.
Basically our plan is to act like a middle man between the vendors and the customers and make it easy for both. For example creating opportunities for these vendors to sale their product and on the other hand providing easy access to the people who want to buy these beautiful piece of art works but cannot find it easily at very reasonable prices because these handmade items are not easily accessible as these are made in rural areas and when it is brought to main city through different sources automatically the price increases so we will create a direct link between the customer and vendor.
For the time being now we have signed a contract with a small leather industry and with different people who have skills to make handmade jewelry, knitted baby shoes and some other artistic products made with wool. We also have contact with some people who have skills to carve the stone and convert it into beautiful and artistic things.
As we all belong to different cities and we believe in teamwork so we divided the tasks and responsibilities in such a manner that
Currently we are working in two cities i.e. Lahore and Karachi. Ayesha, Ali Hassan and Tehmina will be dealing Lahore section while Hafsa & Ashar will be handling Karachi section. From Lahore we’ll be selling leather goods & stone statues while from Karachi we’ll be dispatching handmade jewelry and woolen shoes. Sarmad will be keeping the record of finance on excel sheets, Laiba will be looking after the Instagram page, posts. Ahmed will be dealing with paid promotions and graphic designing and Hafsa will be adding product details and descriptions for posts on pages. But as you know it’s teamwork so we all help each other in completing their tasks.
This all seems to be very easy but there is a great effort by the whole team in putting this idea to a running business. We started with regular meetings and discussions on the idea, refining it, made industrial visits, surveyed the market and made financial plans that took almost two weeks. After that we worked on logo designing and created our business profiles on facebook and instagram. Then after almost 3–4 weeks we started social media marketing and campaigns. After that we worked on delivery procedures and started displaying our products on our social media handles. Now after almost two months we are able to be regularly active as a business platform and hoping to add a variety of products under our name.
But as we all know that challenges are the part of our life that give you experiences and make you learn. And we believe that we only grow when we face challenges. So the challenges we faced or anticipated during our project were
Fake customers: When a visitor goes to an e-commerce website and signs up, the portal is unaware of the customer, bar the knowledge they entered. Whether the customer information is genuine or not remains questionable. Cash-On-Delivery (COD) purchases using an invalid or fake phone numbers or addresses can cause huge revenue losses.
Building Customer loyalty: Even with the best-designed website out there, without customer trust and loyalty, the business is sure to struggle.
Creating new customers then maintaining them requires an enormous effort. One in all the explanations e-commerce companies specifically face a challenge in building customer trust and loyalty is that the seller and buyer don’t know one another. Nor can they see one another. Thus, the customer is robbed of the senses they might normally depend on in face to face transactions. This may only be made up through time and energy.
Struggle competing on prices: Online merchants frequently compete on price. Lots of sellers list the identical products on their sites, but the costs could also be different. They’re trying to extend their market share by selling the merchandise.
Price competition particularly affects small e-commerce businesses, as mid-sized and huge competitors can often offer products for fewer. Combine this with free shipping, and smaller companies simply can’t afford to compete on price.
Shipping Methods and Time: Online shoppers care about shipping costs and delivery methods. How quickly you deliver the products matters a lot for most of the buyers. A negative shipping experience can have a huge impact on your business. Ecommerce merchants compete on customer experience for shipping the orders. Even if the shipping is free, customers would expect fast delivery of their orders. Regardless of the shipping method used, the buyers would expect the delivery within a week. We try to choose carriers that can provide tracking service and notifications when the parcel is shipped, when it’s on the way, arrived near the destination, and when it will be delivered. Real-time tracking gives complete peace of mind to the customers.
So this was the whole journey regarding our project started with a very raw idea then converting it into a business. In the beginning it seems very difficult to achieve what we had planned but through regular hard work and amazing team coordination we have achieved half of it and now looking forward to taking this venture to the next level by your support.
