Gargi Gupta finds everyday objects with a new lease of life.
There are a whole lot of designers making quirky everyday objects with a degree of funk to sass up your home.
Happily Unmarried is the most well-known of these and many of its products such as the Sandaas ashtray or the glasses with edgy slogans — Daaru, Size Zero, Thunder Thighs, and so on — are readily available in lifestyle-product stores in all the metros.
New Delhi also has Play Clan, which sells everything from tote bags to cushion covers, bottle openers to key-chains embellished with its distinctive, colourful doodles. Then there’s the People Tree store, also in the capital, which specialises in “green” chic.
Mumbai has Loose Ends, which stocks interestint odds and ends — coasters shaped like the male and female icons, fridge magnets with smart-alec blurbs, a magazine holder shape with the letters MAGS, furniture laminated with newsprint, personal photographs, comics.
Another store, It’s a fluke store, in Mumbai sells candle-stands, lamps, boxes and the like painted and lacquered in rich baroque motifs.
Now there’s also an online store where you can buy such stuff and get it home-delivered. Quirkoshop.com, started by Kaveri Medappa, a chartered accountant and young mother from Bangalore as a small Facebook enterprise, just four months ago, offers established labels such as Happily Unmarried and Loose Ends, and more recent ones such as The Bright Side (specialist lighting designers) and The Dotted i, as also designers such as Mukul Goyal.
Medappa’s clients are mainly young people between 25 and 35 who’re setting up home, and have a bit — not too much — of their pay cheques left to do up the home. So everything is affordable, “the cheapest being Rs 120 and the most expensive, Rs 4,500”.
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Happily Unmarried PLAY CLAN LOOSE ENDS IT’S A FLUKE STORE |
