Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Why we stopped renting Bharatanatyam Jewelry ?

Dance jewelry renting is still a good business in cities like Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Trivandrum and Trissur in south India. Many local dance jewellery shop keepers regularly rent many sets including Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dance costumes to groups of children who performs once or twice in a year. Even though they can afford to buy in most cases, many parents in India think it is very convenient to rent, use and return for one fourth of the buying cost. They can avoid the maintenance job too !

About six years ago, when we started IndiaMartInUSA.com we also thought of renting dance jewelry should be a good business model here in USA. We did rent dance jewelry and costumes for a while. Soon realized the maintenance and shipping charges are more than what we could charge from a customer. The customer also was paying too much in shipping charges. A dance costume which is only $120 was rented for $40. The customer paid anywhere from $22 to $30 for both ways shipping and ended up paying more than half of the cost of the dress just to use it for one time. As a business, we had to dryclean the dress each time it was back from renter. Some times we found Altha and marker dots and lines in the dance dress making it completely useless after one or two uses.

So the renting model for the dance jewellery and dance costumes didn't work out good. Today concentrate on the quality and delivery time of our dance jewelry and costumes and have real good customer base all over the world.

Thank you for the continuous support.