Mahabalipuram--Art & Craft Hub

Mahabalipuram being close vicinity to our college campus is a hangout place for the GreatLakers. The deadly combo of Beach, good food and of course the drinks attract us a lot. One evening I landed up in Mahabs not for fun but for our Individual Marketing Project. Have no idea about the subject, I was drawling here and there while my other friends were having fun. But it turned out to be a good learning experience.

To my surprise I could see lots of “Art & Craft” shop in such a small place like Mahabs.

I had decided my subject J.I saw few really beautiful metal and stone statues kept outside the shop for display. I entered this shop with the name “Southern Arts & Crafts”.I was really a very big shop as compared to its other competitor.

Looking at my GLIM ID  the owner understood that I am  not his customer. I was bit worried that getting lot of data would be tough as I didn’t knew Tamil. To my surprise the owner was speaking affluent English and he had staff who could even speak in Hindi. That was really a good Business strategy!

Randomly I started asking the prices of few Art works. I was really amazed to know that these were really costly stuff and some of them even priced in Lakhs. I was confused Why would someone come and buy such costly stuff in Mahabalipuram and why not Chennai?

Shopkeeper gave a smile on my question and told that Mahabalipuram is known for this business and many of these shops here are 20-25 year old. Many of the statues were made by local sculptors and they are into this work from generations.Even many items were brought from other states like Karnataka,Maharashtra.

There were art works such as statues, painting etc. made up of wood, Stone and Metal of varying size and dimension.

Metal items were mostly made up of copper and bronze .Wood items were of rose wood and teak wood while stones items were mostly of granite, marble and black stone. There was few painting of Oil paint.

These art work were mainly religious in nature depicting Hindu mythology, Buddha etc. 

  I saw couple of foreigner in the shop. Those chaps were really happy and interested in these statues and some of them even purchased few items. For these foreigners it was just a piece of decoration.

The items in the shop were strategically placed and easy to attract customer and even had Air conditioned installed so that they can hold the customer for the longer time. All the new edition and costly items were placed at the 1^st section to grab customer attention.

I could see that the Owner had a good business sense. Shop being centrally located, big in size and the variety of the product, shops designed with good business strategy would definitely give a touch time to all its surrounding competitors.

Danish Ahmad

FT13420