Before ‘Bond’, Caberwal launched Exclusively.com bought later by Flipkart.
AB Wire
Sonny Caberwal (Courtesy of facebook)
Indian American entrepreneur Sonny Caberwal has found a way to personalize greeting cards with the users’ handwriting, written by a robot though.
Caberwal’s venture, Bond, headquartered in New York City, mixed the traditional with cutting-edge technology: it harks back to a time of fountain pens, creamy sheets of writing paper and wax-sealed envelopes. Plus robots to deliver the personalized message.
Caberwal, founder and chief executive of Bond, describes it as “the opposite of Snapchat,” according to a report in The New York Times.
Bond was started in 2013, and has about 50 full-time employees and several high-profile backers, like Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and the rapper Nasir Jones (known as Nas).
Although handwritten notes and cards may seem like artifacts of the 20th century, greeting cards are still a strong business. According to the Greeting Card Association, Americans purchase about 6.5 billion cards a year and annual sales are estimated to be $7 billion to $8 billion. Despite a culture awash in digital communications, the greeting card and stationery industries have not declined precipitously but have remained largely flat, said Patti Stracher, director of the National Stationery Show, an annual trade show and business event for stationery, greeting card and gift companies, said the Times report.
Bond built its own writing machine, which can produce personalized notes for every customer. Designed by the company’s chief technology officer, Kenji Larsen, the machines have robotic arms that can hold a pen, a paintbrush or a marker. The paper is moved around using static electricity — rather than a roller — so it stays pristine, with no wrinkles or marks. Bond also seals each envelope with wax, adds postage and mails it.
Customers can choose from a variety of handwriting styles, or they can have their own handwriting copied and digitized for $500. Each customer’s original signature is uploaded to Bond via smartphone, to be used on cards and notes. Customers also upload recipients’ addresses. If an address is unknown, the service will send an email or text message to the recipient asking for it. An invitation-only premium service, Bond Black, costs $1,200 a year and provides clients with a personalized mobile app to send notes in their own handwriting on custom stationery, the Times reported.
Many of Bond’s biggest customers are commercial, including Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and small independent businesses like professional services firms and real estate brokers.
“Companies spend $23 billion on customer relationship management tools to understand and have a more personal relationship with their customers. We are the physical implementation of that,” Caberwal was quoted as saying by the Times.
Earlier this year, Fast Company, in a story on Bond, quoted Caberwal as saying, “We think there’s a lot of friction points when it comes to doing something nice for someone else. Nobody has ever said, ‘You know what’s awesome? I had the best experience at American Greetings.'”
Bond wants to bring the romance back to letter writing with a more modern experience.
“We have really set out to reimagine what that would look like—how we can create a truly personal experience that lets people deliver that personal touch that is truly theirs, but let them do it from anywhere,” he added.
Before he founded Bond, Caberwal was a corporate lawyer, played percussion with the band Thievery Corporation, founded a tea store, modeled for Kenneth Cole and, with his wife, started the online fashion company Exclusively.com in India. That company was acquired by the Indian e-commerce marketplace Flipkart. By that time he, his wife and their young daughter were back in New York, and Caberwal was looking to start another company, the Times reported. Bond took shape.
Bond now has 200 robotic writing machines in its Manhattan facilities (although the machines are manufactured at a plant it owns in Rhinebeck, N.Y.), and it also produces its own stationery. The company raised “a few million” in seed funding, Caberwal said, and is in the midst of an effort to raise $3 million. By the end of the year, Bond expects to have about $500,000 a month in sales, he said, adding that revenue has been growing from 30 to 50 percent a month. Caberwal said he expected Bond to be profitable by the second quarter of 2016. A single card costs $3.50, but for corporate customers with larger orders, the price ranges from $2 to $2.50 a card, the Times reported.
“We don’t think it’s necessarily about the time you take to put together the gift; it’s the intent. Bond is for all those times you’re thinking of someone and want to do something about it. We want to create technology that will let you finally act upon that intention,” he was quoted as saying by Fast Company.