Leaders
Kunjal Nirwani: Steering Craftgully To New Heights With An Artistic Approach
Kunjal Nirwani
Co-Founder & Partner
For the past few years, we have seen a tremendous change in the role of women in the business sphere, they not only run a business but also face problems tactfully. Realizing their own potential, they are grabbing opportunities and making a place in the industry dominated by men. With a motive of encouraging new methods in the art and craft field, Kunjal Nirwani is giving a perfect example of blending craft and vision into a business and making her mark in the industry.
Graduated from Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai with Applied Arts, she started working for companies and providing design solutions from where she enhanced her knowledge. To follow her passion for art and craft, Kunjal established CraftGully.com in the year 2012, providing an exclusive range of art and craft supplies for crafters across.
In an exclusive interview with Women Entrepreneur, Kunjal Nirwani talks more about her professional journey and how she is leading the change in the industry.
Tell us about CraftGully? What are the important features of your expertise as an entrepreneur you would like to share through this article?
Established in the year 2012, with an initial focus on providing quilling-related crafting sup-plies to crafters across India, CraftGully.com has grown to cater to a wide range of quality crafting supplies covering decoupage, scrapbooking, mixed media, card making, and, ever-green crafts such as jewellery making, flower making, macrame, and more.
CraftGully is purely an online store with its complete warehousing and logistics situated in the heavenly state of Goa. Over the nine years of existence, CraftGully has delivered close to a million products to more than 30 countries around the world.
Entrepreneurship can be a rocky road, but we creative professionals I believe, have an inherent potential for being natural entrepreneurs. Not only are we used to running our owndesign shop while in college itself, but our schooling itself is in bringing out creative solutions to problems that companies face. The key lies in being able to extend that schooling from pure design to other parts of a venture.
Brief us about your educational journey before your industry experience. What motivated you to be the Co-Founder of the firm?
After completing my Bachelor’s in Fine Arts (Applied Arts) from the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, I worked in some of the largest companies in India providing design solutions for print communications, packaging, events, film publicity, as well as digital. This varied experience helped me better understand the digital medium on one end, and the 3-dimensional aspect of design and production on the other end.
I have been crafting ever since I can remember, and my degree in BFA only served to enhance and hone my inclination towards it. In 2011, when we moved from Mumbai to Goa, I went looking for materials to indulge my passion, and found it very difficult to find a wide enough range of quality crafting materials. Sensing an opportunity led us to the establishment of CraftGully. com in the year 2012 as a one of it’s kind online craft store in India.
What are the various roles and responsibilities that you currently shoulder at CraftGully? What are the challenges you face and how do you overcome them? My main responsibilities center around the conceptualization and formulation of products and kits. Additionally, I also spearhead our digital communication initiatives, the website content, design, and content usability.
“A woman has many faces – that of a wife, a mother, a daughter, but i believe that it is only when she is working towards something professionally that she can be truly herself”
The crafting field is constantly evolving be it mediums, forms, techniques, applications, and the most challenging aspect is to stay ahead. Thankfully, my inclination toward crafting is helping me to explore the application of mediums, as well as, learn and try out different forms of crafts.
What is the most significant milestone you have achieved so far in your professional journey? What evolutions do you see in your field of work?
I believe every step is a milestone, is significant in itself and reason is enough to celebrate. It could be a heart felt note from a customer mentioning how creating with our products helped get her through a particular turbulent phase of her life, or the sheer joy in a customer’s note at finding a product that she had been searching for, for a long time, to complete her project.
I can say proudly that we have delivered our products to the remotest corners of India and sold our products across 30 countries in the world.
The trend that I see in the crafting field is the revival of traditional crafts such as mandala art but in a contemporary form. There is also an increasing usage of industrial materials such as cement in crafting projects, and another interesting trend is the blending of technology and crafting.
What advice you would like to give to young women and girls who are aspiring to become business leaders in the future?
A woman has many faces – that of a wife, a mother, a daughter, but I believe that it is only when she is working towards something professionally that she can be truly herself. It could be as a leader in a company or part of a team, as a professional or as an entrepreneur. I would strongly urge each and every woman and girl to hold on to that part which is inherently you.
Kunjal Nirwani, Co-Founder & Partner, Craftgully
She turned her passion for art and craft into a business venture and today her business is flourishing and spreading in every part of the world. Kunjal Nirwani as the Co-Founder and Partner of CraftGully is artistically developing her firm and taking it to new heights.
Educational Qualification: R: Bachelor in Fine Arts (Applied Art) from JJ School of Arts, Mumbai B. Com (Mumbai University) Diploma in Applied Art (Rachana Sansad, Mumbai) Snehlata Paul memorial award by Calcutta University.