- [Werner Vogels] Our planets 
and our civilizations
are changing faster than ever before.
Join me as I travel the globe
talking to startup founders,
using technologies to make
our world more interesting,
accessible, and livable.
These are the entrepreneurs
that are creating
the future we will live in.
This is Now Go Build.
India is a place that is impossible
to describe in words,
it truly has to be experienced.
It has one of the longest,
uninterrupted written histories
of religion, art, culture, and politics.
It is hard for many of us
to conceive of generational
traditions that have lasted
well over 2,000 years.
It is almost more difficult to conceive
of those traditions disappearing
in only one generation.
India's past is rich, but
its bright, new future
runs the risk of erasing a way of life
for many artisans that
work in age old forms.
India's growth to the
most populous democracy
on the planet is astounding.
Due to our modern technological revolution
and a singular global economy.
We are witnessing one of the
world's oldest societies,
morph in the historical blink of an eye
and Bangalore is largely at
the center of that evolution,
the Silicon Valley of India,
it is home to many of
the country's largest
technology companies,
and a booming startup community.
The gravitational pull of good pay,
modern living and joining
the growing middle class
has had a profound impact
on many Indian traditions,
as well as the smaller communities
where those traditions were born.
Sujay Suresh and Innu Nevatia,
founders of Zwende have
dedicated themselves
to using their business
and technology acumen
to ensure that traditional artisanship
remains a sustainable
way to live in India.
- This village is called
Nimmalakunta village,
which is in the state of Andhra Pradesh,
one of the four Southern Indian states.
There are about 70 families
that currently practice this art form.
So we'll introduce you to our
first artist who is Venkatesh.
Yeah, so he's here.
- Thanks for having us here.
- So we just walk around and have a look.
And we'll explain the art form to you.
- In fact, each state like
if you talk about 25 states,
across these 25 states,
there are 10,000 plus unique art forms.
- And the thing is 80% of
these are dying art forms.
- If they continue to
practice these art forms,
the way they've been
done centuries earlier,
or for centuries,
it's no longer palatable
for the modern day consumer.
Therefore, it's very, very important
to take it to people so
make it more accessible.
And we give it a form
that more and more people
in the current age like.
- [Sujay] So Zwende is solving
for the creative supply chain
in India,
what we realized is that these art forms
and artisans have infinite creativity,
but limited resources.
- [Innu] So we work with artisans,
we digitize their inventory
of products and designs.
And within this portfolio,
people can mix and match
and create their own
combinations of designs.
That combination is sent
back to the artisans
and they would physically
handcraft it and make it
and then that would be
delivered to the customer.
- Tell me a bit more about your onboarding
because that seems like it's
not a self service process.
It's a heavyweight process.
- Yeah, When we onboard a designer,
we are trying to understand
what's the story,
what's the inspiration
behind what they do.
So we create a page, you know, for them,
where we talk about their background,
their storyline, all of that.
And we also do the photography
and the modularization and digitization.
I would say our dream
would be to enable artisans
in the remotest of villages
in India to create things
for people that truly matches
their style and taste.
So this is parchment leather,
and the art form is called tholu bommalata
or leather puppetry.
So, what they used to do in about 200 BC
is that they would paint
life sized puppets,
which would depict different characters
from Hindu mythology.
And as you can see,
these have been colored
with really bright colors.
So that's the traditional art form.
- [Venkatesh] And because
the leather is translucent,
and puppet shows are a dying art form,
they extend themselves
well, to lampshades.
So if you see what she's
painting right now,
it's using the same art
form on parchment leather,
but what she's painting is a lampshade.
But they still use very
traditional motifs,
very traditional colors
and traditional designs.
So we'll just take you to another place
that shows you some finished lampshades.
- Okay.
- So you'll get an idea
of how it sort of looks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
- Okay.
- So you see, these are all hand painted.
Yeah.
- So it's wet.
- Intricate yes,
yeah.
- Wonderful.
So how many people
actually are in the village
that are living off this art form?
- So there are about 70 families
that actually practice
this art form right now.
It used to be a lot more before.
And so you can see outside every home
there are people who sit
and work through the day.
And these families
migrated into this village
and became a smaller community.
- So there weren't 70
families here originally.
- No, so about 1,500 years back,
they migrated from Maharashtra.
- Okay.
- To Andhra Pradesh we are currently in
the state of Andhra Pradesh.
And that's how they came
here and they started
practicing the art form over here.
(in foreign language)
- That's the starting point.
- Yeah, the black and white.
So you can see that bamboo stick,
so they make a small
slit, they make it sharp,
like a pen, and then
they dip in natural dye
and they do the painting.
- Okay.
- So here you see a different form
and size of the lampshade.
So there's a lot of creativity
that these guys have
and it's just a question of
how do we bring it to market
so that it's more consumable.
- So it's about the information given
that they're not tech savvy.
This is that you give them
so that they can start to
optimize their business.
- So from day zero,
we had a feedback loop that
we built for our designers,
we help them predict not
only what ready inventory
they should hold,
but also what raw
inventory they should get.
Similarly, we try and tell them what works
in different parts of the country.
So we tell them,
hey, you know what the market
is looking for these products,
these are doing well.
Your art form can be
easily extended to these.
So we think you should
launch and every time
we have used this kind of data analytics
to launch a product,
we've seen it become a best seller.
- I think it's very
important to look at data.
You know, look at not just
what you want to offer,
but what customers want, listen to them.
And if you can figure out a scalable
and a structured way to pass that
feedback back to your designers,
I think you only create more and more
of what customers want.
- I wanted to see Zwende's workshop space.
Here, they demonstrate how to adopt
the traditional art forms to
create more lifestyle products
and broaden the market for this work,
and how they use data to
predict what will sell.
- We show you how
modularization of design works.
So these are different designs
that are available on the website.
- Okay.
- Right.
And the same design goes on,
let's say, this kind of a product,
it could go on this kind of a product,
or it could go on this kind of a product.
- That's really to minimize
the amount of inventory
that you need to hold in
exchange for expediency
of shipping and accuracy.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- So it's a careful balance,
What are these things on top here?
- So these are the frames
that are used to make
the lampshade with the
same artwork which is this.
So this is the tholu bommalata.
So this is what is hand
painted on leather,
which goes on bags or it goes on frames.
So again, that's the
sort of modularization
that we have done, because
it's the same size of artwork
and design that gets wrapped on a lamp
or goes on a bag.
And so again, the risk of holding
that artwork as raw
inventory is diversified
across a lampshade, and a variety of bags.
- And again, given the modular nature,
we are now getting different artists
to give different forms of art
that can be used in this bag.
So with modularization, again,
we can increase the depth of the skills
with many different art forms.
- [Werner] So you mentioned
earlier when we were walking around
about that sort of younger generations
expect something different
from unique products.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So if you see just around
us, this is this art form
and its most traditional heritage form,
which is you know, life-sized puppets
or wall art and not too many people
in the younger generation would appreciate
something always which is so
traditional and so colorful.
So Zwende works with boutique designers,
these are typically
design schools students
who in turn work with artisans
to train them to contemporize their art
and make it more palatable
for the current day consumer.
- And that makes you way more beyond
just a marketplace.
- Absolutely.
And actually create new forms of the art
Okay, so artisans more are from villages
like this,
where the designers are more urban?
- Urban women, yes, absolutely.
You know, one of the
things that gets us to work
every single day, and that
excites us the most is,
you know, being able to empower women.
With us following a made to order model.
We've been able to empower
a lot of these women
entrepreneurs and sort of
bring them into this online
ecosystem and enable them
to have consistent income.
So, before Zwende, their point of sale
was two flea markets a year,
but now they have sustainable,
consistent monthly incomes,
thanks to revenues and business
that's coming from Zwende.
- While India's fast growing economy
has been a boon for many,
only 14% of the entrepreneurs
in India are women.
Zwende has set her sights
on raising that number.
Thank you for letting me into your house.
Can you show me this?
- [Shamli Das] Yeah.
So this is a nameplate,
which I'm doing for Zwende.
So I choose the colors, I
make some variety of designs.
Then I put these designs on the paper.
- So you put them on the Zwende website?
- Yes.
- Oh, they do it for you.
- They do it for me.
I just have to do this.
And this, that's it.
- Okay.
- They take it up after that.
- Okay.
And how do the, the things that you make,
how do they get to your customers?
Does Zwende take care of that or?
- Absolutely, yes.
So every day there's a shipping guy.
Who comes at 4 and they pick
up the orders for the day.
And my thing is just to keep it ready
before the deadlines.
- So how digital savvy do you need
to be to interact with Zwende?
- I get a message.
And then the all the details
are there on the screen.
So I just have a look and I start with it.
- Okay.
- So I just have to focus on my work.
- Is this enough to
make a business out of?
- It is getting better every year for me.
- Okay, good.
- Like, the orders are quite regular.
And its kind of given me
financial stability too.
- So it must be, I mean,
suddenly you have a platform that can
for all of India, and
maybe even beyond India.
So how does that make
you feel as an artist?
- I think it's very nice
when people start appreciating something
which comes from my own country,
and something which I have done.
It's a great feeling.
- If you have, let's say about 60
to 70 different attributes
at a merchandise
level for your skills,
and then you have so
many different attributes
for your customers.
And then they're taking so many different
journeys on the website,
the real question is,
how do you place the right product
in front of the right
customer at the right time.
Today, a large part of it
is based on collaborative
filtering you know.
- It works.
Kind of.
- People who like this also like this,
and then you do a look-alike on that.
So that's one.
The second is that because
we track user journeys,
and not just events at an
aggregate level on the website,
we know that when a user is
taking a particular journey,
you know, this user is more likely
to convert at this product.
And that when a new user
comes on the website,
and we don't know any
historical information
about them, we'd use the journeys
and some collaborative filtering
to eventually recommend you
know what they would want
- I think at Zwende we can confidently say
that over 80% of our customers today,
we have actually had a conversation with
to understand not only why they bought,
but why they didn't buy or
what would make them buy,
- which is crucial if you want
your recommendations to work.
- Absolutely, yeah.
one of the taglines we started Zwende with
was that our AI is 2,500 year old, right?
- So we basically bake in
the nuances in the rules
of the art form.
And let's assume, you know
for simplicity's sake,
that you have a lampshade and
the lampshade has two parts,
two sides, you know,
if a user selected a black
and white on one side,
and the artisan or the designer says that,
hey, you know what, with black and white,
I'm only going to allow
people to use black and white
because if you mix it with other colors,
that does not preserve
the ethos of the art form.
So as you navigate and
as you try to design,
the million choices
eventually get narrowed down
into a fewer number of choices
for the user to also have
confidence that hey, what
I've created looks good.
- And actually there's another reason,
I think, especially in
your particular case
with so many different product attributes,
that some people took
the Paradox of Choice.
- Yeah.
- That if you only have three choices,
it's easy to choose.
Are you happy with your choice
if you have 500 choices?
- Yes.
- You may still choose the same thing.
- Yes.
- But you may have this
lingering thing your head
going like, maybe,
maybe its not the right one,
so people are less happy.
with the same choice
- Yeah.
And so collaborative filtering
really helps you with just servicing,
limiting the choice and making people
more happy with their choice.
So tell me a bit about sort
of how is your team built up.
is this all technologists or, I mean,
or are these artisans themselves?
Or tell me a bit about your team?
- Okay.
So, in fact, the technology is something
that we don't have in house yet.
And it's thanks to cloud services.
It's thanks to outsource
technology partners
that we have been able to
find to build the technology.
- So in essence, you're the prototypical
built on the cloud startup.
In that sense, the only
people you have in house
are not focused on technology at all.
- Yes, absolutely.
- And so that's your
purely basically spending
all your money on the things that matter
and building a better product.
- Absolutely.
And 100% it's only been possible
because we have these partners
and ready solutions that we
can build this on top of.
- Okay, wonderful.
Stop watching me.
One thing that really struck me was
that when we started building AWS,
we really started building a platform
so that others could focus
on the kind of things
that they really wanted to do.
Yeah,
I mean, you guys don't want to be in IT.
Now you want to be a platform for artists.
And what I've seen with you is that you
actually do exactly the
same thing that AWS do.
You provide a complete
managed service environment
for artists, so that
they don't have to think
about customer acquisition,
they don't have to think about shipping,
they don't have to think
about supply chain.
And so in essence,
I see you guys as a nice layer,
similar to AWS as an artist cloud service.
Yeah.
- And I think you've
hit the nail on the head
with our passion turning into business.
It's amazing that you you call
it an artist cloud service.
And I think that's
something that we are going
to latch on to.
- So I actually have a
question for you, Werner.
You've seen what we've done.
You've built Amazon for so many years,
what would you advise
us in terms of things
that we should avoid doing?
- I think, if I look
back at all the mistakes
and whether it's me or
whether we as Amazon did,
it's always mistakes of omission.
Things that you think
you should have done,
but you put it off.
Yeah.
And as such, I think, you know,
whenever something comes to you
a gut feeling says we
should be going after this.
Do it.
Just make it an experiment.
Yeah, see what happens.
Yeah, try to keep it as lean
and as mean as possible.
And pretty quickly, you'll
know whether there's,
whether there is something there.
So whenever your gut
says, this might be good,
but your mind your head
says, maybe next year,
do it now.
It is no surprise that I believe in
the power of technology to
change things for the better.
Our ability to innovate
and create and connect
has resulted in the most amazing
advances in human history
and there's no end in sight.
But with every advance,
every gain in efficiency
or connectivity, there's always the risk
of leaving something behind.
Some of these things are precious.
Here in Nimmalakunta is just
one example of technology
making it possible to save an art form
that may have been lost,
an art form that supports
the precious thing a town, a community,
a family.
(upbeat music)
