“A gift from the market is available to everyone, then how can it be special?” asks Shalini Peddada. She is one of the entrepreneurs in the city who are working round the clock to make your Friendship Day special by making gifts with a personal touch. With customised gifts trending in the market more people are ditching conventional greeting cards and friendship bands and opting for unique ideas to convey their love. As the first Sunday of August inches closer, people who are aware about the significance of this day start gearing up for joyous celebrations of Friendship Day.
Peddada, who runs Collection D, an online gift store is preparing for a busy week ahead. With Friendship Day just around the corner, she has been spending her days designing key rings, photo frames and mini Ferris wheels with photographs and quotes. She lets her imagination run wild with mix and match of colourful charms, metallic dazzlers and elegant string lights. “Every gift that I make has a secret message. I ask my clients to write something for their friend and add that to the gift to make the person feel special,” says Peddada, who uses social media to sell her products.
Peddada believes that bespoke products are the way ahead as people no longer accept whatever is thrown at them in the market. The same ideology works for Trishla Hirawat who has been making customised gifts for the past four years. Watch boxes decorated with artificial flowers and tiny pearls or photo frames with intricate designs and decoupage gift boxes from Hirawat’s collection are selling like hot cakes.
Hirawat, who sells these customised gifts under the label Art Factory Vizag, says, “The age group that is more inclined towards personalised gifts is 20 to 45 years. Unlike teenagers who consider everyone their friend, people of this age group are more experienced and have those two or three friends who stick with them through thick and thin. These people go lengths to convey their feelings to their friends. This age group also holds the purchasing power.” Hirawat has a client base in Hyderabad, Mumbai and Raipur.
Friendship Day was created by the US-based Hallmark cards founder Joyce Hall in 1930. This was played up by the greeting cards industry to shoot up the sales of their products. However, the buzz around the cards has eventually died says Yeshwanth Parekh, who owns a gift store, Darlings Paradise in Waltair Uplands. “No one chooses to buy greeting cards these days. Cards have been replaced by personalised gifts,” he says. New in the market are glass jars with dolls and handmade papers on which one can write their message. People can also get their greetings printed on a glitter pillow or write them in scrap books that are made specially for the day.
