Hartal, puttu kadala, shaap, Yesudas, meen curry, Munnar, adipoli, mundu, soda, houseboat, pazhampori, Vishu, payasam, Kathakali, ayala, mathi, Kovalam.... no prizes for guessing which State we are talking about. A poster that compressed all the above into a bottle and called it ‘Absolut Malayali’ with the tagline ‘Country of God’ was destined to come up trumps and it did!
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That one poster made Funcher Shop with its merchandise of T-shirts, posters and mugs a familiar name amongst people from Kerala.
It all began two years ago in Bengaluru. Used to keeping a close eye on brands and products, ad man Suresh Ramakrishnan found that almost all Indian brands that were into gifting and décor focussed on North India and popular culture north of the Vindhyas. He wondered why no one thought of cashing in on market-savvy consumers in South India, many of whom were comfortable in English.
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That is when Suresh met illustrator and artiste Arosh Thevadathil and found that they shared the same vision. Thus was born Funcher Shop, an online space for buying souvenirs and T-shirts, as a unit of Applegreen Creative Studio.
The initial idea was to evolve products that represented a slice of life in West Bengal and Kerala.
“I am a Malayali from Palakkad who was born and brought up in Kolkata and Arosh is from Kozhikode. Sinu Rajendran, our illustrator from Mavelikara, and associate copy editor Arjun Kodoth from Kasaragod, form our core creative team,” explains Suresh about the creative studio that has struck a chord with Malayalis on account of their quirky products that take a dig at different aspects of popular Malayali culture or celebrate the quintessential Malayali.
“We have been very lucky. Each of one us in the core team has a unique strength and we capitalise on that during our brainstorming sessions. Arjun, for instance, is a diehard cinephile. There is a hardly a Malayalam film he has not seen. So, when he comes up with an iconic dialogue or one-liner from a movie, we sit together to decide how to put it across to buyers in the catchiest way,” explains Suresh.
One of their popular products was a T-shirt that had the dialogue ‘Sadhanam Kaiyil undo’ from the cult Mohanlal-Sreenivasan film Akkare Akkare Akkare. Done in stylised Malayalam, the T-shirt was much in demand among expats as well, says Suresh. Another T-shirt had a catchy line from the Sathyan Anthikkad-Sreenivasan film, Sandesham. Although the original one was in Malayalam, the team translated it into English with the line ‘Don’t utter a word about Poland’ emblazoned on the front of the Tee with Sreenivasan’s face printed just above the one-liner.
“Not only did the Poland T-shirt become a top seller, it also became popular during the previous World Cup and many Polish fans bought the T-shirts with a slight variation: ‘England or Iceland or Switzerland but don’t utter a word about Poland’. Some of our clients sent us pictures of Polish fans wearing the T-shirts during the matches,” recalls Suresh.
He adds: “I have often noticed that when Malayalis meet outside Kerala, the first question they ask is ‘Nadu evideya’ (Where are you from?). So, we used that as a creative slogan on our T-shirt, which was again snapped up in record time.”
A graduate of RLV College of Fine Arts, Tripunithura, Arosh worked for about three years in Thiruvananthapuram and so he had a group of friends to turn to in order to get right the famous dialect of the capital city. “We gave the idea to our friends and they got us the right words that we used on a mug on the capital city and its landmarks,” explains Arosh. Similar mugs were made for Kozhikode and Kochi as well.
During the floods in August, the team got inspired by the way Kerala tackled the crisis and came out with a couple of products that paid homage to everyday heroes who came to the rescue of the flood-hit in different parts of Kerala. “So we did one on the air rescue of a pregnant woman from a flooded building and also one on National Disaster Response Force officer Kanhaiya Kumar, who ran with a child in his arms across a bridge that was being inundated to ensure that the kid reached a hospital. In fact, Vijay Varma, the naval officer who rescued the pregnant woman, got in touch with us to thank us for the gesture,” remembers Suresh.
Looking ahead, Suresh says that their dream is to open an outlet soon in Kochi.