: Students Launch Terracotta Startup With Just Rs 50000, Increase Artisan Incomes by 40% #IndiaNEWS #Lede In the heart of India’s handicraft community, rural artisans are sculpting simplistic earthenware

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Students Launch Terracotta Startup With Just Rs 50000, Increase Artisan Incomes by 40% #IndiaNEWS #Lede
In the heart of India’s handicraft community, rural artisans are sculpting simplistic earthenware with the skill of their hands.
The process begins when the clay is meticulously sieved and churned to the right consistency in a homemade contraption. Every product shaped from this mud is dried, and then fired in a kiln rising to infernal temperatures ranging anywhere between 600 and 1,000 degree celsius.
Alongside, two 20-year-olds from the pink city of Rajasthan are working to deliver these anachronistic beauties to your location, while helping sustain the art of terracotta pottery.
Abhinav Agarwal and Megha Joshi’s Mittihub is an online store that sells earthenware delivered directly from artisans to buyers. What’s unique about the venture is its allegiance to those 25 potters back home, who are now receiving a monthly income of up to Rs 40,000 from an art that was expected to get lost amid machine-made bulk production.
A terracotta artist at work
A concept with a cause
“It all began in 2020 when we were asked to build an ecommerce platform for a college project. Conversations about the dying art of handmade terracotta had been flying in my house, and I decided to take the topic up,� Abhinav, a student of the Global Centre for Entrepreneurship and Commerce (GCEC), tells The Better India.
The artisans of rural India carry the dual weight of hand-crafted art as custodians of heritage and pallbearers of economic livelihood. With the advent of industrialisation, consumerism has shifted to machine-made mass produced goods, leaving behind the delicacy of uniquely crafted products. “What little these people are able to earn is taken away by middlemen as commission charges, which soar up to 50% of the total revenue,� he says.
The duo collected all this information through research and on-ground conversations with the potters of different communities.
Getting together a team of seven undergraduates, the duo got down to setting up a new customer base for their terracotta products. Initially, they had five artisans on board for the venture.
“We pooled in an initial investment of Rs 50,000 from our own savings as well as loans from friends and family and got down to business,� he says.
Aggregator delivery services were on-boarded for shipping, a website was created, and artisans were trained to deliver products of consistent quality.
Meanwhile, the startup was also selected by the Catalyst cohort of Atal Incubation Center as well.
Abhinav says the strategy was to get enough pre-orders to make the business profitable from the start. This was done by employing organic marketing strategies like word of mouth.

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