At a time when the central government is going all out to promote manufacturing in the country with its 'Make In India' campaign, Bengaluru-based collaborative invention startup, Witworks is working with an innovative concept of crowd-sourcing of ideas that solve real-life problems, and bring out products that are manufactured locally to a significant extent.
Started in 2014 by three Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Kharagpur alumni - Somnath Meher (26), Chandrashekhar Iyer (25) and Ankit DP (25), Witworks launched its first product called Rewind, an earphones entanglement solution last year. While the video that was launched to introduce Rewind went viral on social media, the first batch of 10,000 units was sold out within three days of launch.
The company has so far profitably sold 20,000 units of Rewind, which was completely designed and manufactures in India, and has recently launched pre-orders for two new products--a hand-held electric dishwasher Scrubbl and a wifi-enabled audio streaming device Trippy.
"We are selling Rewind through most of the leading e-commerce platforms in India," said Ankit DP. "On our Witworks community we have over 1,500 members who are sharing ideas and problems regularly. The ideas for Scrubbl and Trippy were shortlisted based on voting from our community."
After shortlisting of ideas, Witworks conducts product research and works on the design for around a month, before creating a prototype. The manufacturing of the products is outsourced to specific companies that Witworks ties up with. While most of these companies are Indian, the company now believes that it may need to import some parts for its future products, as those may not be easily available in India.
Idea for Scrubbl was given by Bina Keshava, a working mother of three, while that for Trippy was by an electronics engineer Omkar Kulkarni.
Since it started taking pre-orders for the new products around 10 days ago, Witworks has already received orders for 126 units of Scrubbl, and 97 units of Trippy. The company targets to raise Rs 15 lakh in the pre-orders for Scrubbl and Rs 20 lakh for Trippy.
Witworks will only get the two products to a production stage if it receives pre-orders for at least 1,000 units of each, Trippy and Scrubbl. Trippy, if manufactured, will directly compete with the likes of Google, which is also in the process of launching a similar product.
While China is widely seen as the most viable manufacturing destination, Ankit said, the nine-member team of Witworks has been able to tap into manufacturing capabilities in India that make more business sense than importing the same product would.
"Discovering a manufacturer is tough in India, but once we are able to find the right partner for that, we get agility that is far better than producing a product in China or elsewhere," he said. "We are speaking to several manufacturers in India for Scrubbl and Trippy also and will get most of these products made locally."
