An effort to showcase Indian art & culture digitally
An effort to showcase Indian art & culture digitally

Appreciation of Indian art & culture beyond national borders is no news, but when it comes to the economical part, there are still myriad of challenges in order to make it easily available to the world.
iMusti, a startup that not only brings together India’s illustrious history in digital formats but also makes it accessible to the world. In a candid conversation with Retailer Media, Samir Khandwala, Founder & CEO, iMusti.com shares some insights on how he plans to transform Indian history digitally using three essential formats: Music, Movies and Books.

Talk to us about iMusti and the journey so far.
At iMusti, our vision is to have the largest collection of Indian art & culture on our platform. We would like to have one of the largest content be it audio, video, eBooks, photographs etc., covering all aspects of Indian culture on a single platform. Since we have started this company, we have accumulated huge pile of audios, videos and other format of materials and now we plan to enter into painting and photographs in the coming year.
Indian art & culture is huge and diverse, and to showcase this we need a concentrated effort so that such large collections are easily available for today’s consumers in a very fashionable and modern way. Indian literature, art, music etc are not famous just among Indian but also non-Indian. Thus making content available for worldwide market is very important.

Share with us the joy of being awarded as the best performer at the Flipkart’s event.
It was an excellent traction that we have achieved on Flipkart during the sales. It was an appropriate promotion that Flipkart created. Participation in the Sale bonanza gave us a multi-level growth during this phase.
I congratulate Flipkart for coming up with such an excellent idea and I guess we were there at the right place at the right time.

How do you see eReading evolving in the in the country?
We expect a very strong demand for some special interest categories in education. Indian student are very sharp and ambitious and they need specialised educational materials for their education. Whether be in engineering, medical, accounting or special interest categories such as architecture, cooking, gardening, paintings, sculptures and others, all these categories are becoming very popular. We aim to provide the right kind of study material for all these categories.
Even children books and comics have a very strong demand and fiction /non-fiction books are very popular these days. This demand is going to grow and move to the online space as people are becoming more tech savvy day by day.

Can you share with us the kind of materials you have on your website?
We have ebooks available on our website for all of the above the mentioned categories.  We also have music streaming, downloading etc. We have all formats that customers can access. For example, in the books category we don’t have regular PDFs. We have ePUBs which is an enhanced form of PDFs where in one can adjust font size and style, do easy search, attach dictionary, can make notes and many other such features are available with our format. And these features are not just for English contents but for every other language.

Do you through your own website? How has been the response there?
Yes we do sell through our own website and the response has been quite well. But we don’t want to break our tie-up with these eCommerce majors as they have a huge customer base and we share a very healthy relationship with them.

How has been the response from tier II and III cities in the country?
To be honest, we are experiencing higher growth from tier II and III cities. It is because of the fact that urbanisation that is happening and all the digital devices (smartphones, tablets, iPads etc) are becoming very popular across the country. There is a special interest for this category. Now that eCommerce platforms are operational is small towns and cities, people explore more and more and they are more active in comparison to the metro consumers.

How do you manage your logistics?
For our online deliveries we have tie ups with many logistics service providers such as FedEx and even for the international market we have tie-ups with the top providers of the market.  

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