The promotions happened on their own, just the way the foursome's garden venture was born. Besides friends and FaceBook, My Sunny Balcony (MSB) was lucky enough to find a range of magazines and newspapers to feature it across a spectrum of target audiences, recalls Reena Chengappa. MSB, she says, shows up in the Top 5 searches for gardens and landscaping.
She and three garden-minded young men chucked up their corporate jobs one fine day in 2009 and decided to plunge full-time “into bringing gardens back into Garden City homes”. There were store rooms, shacks, balcony strips and forgotten niches to make over. Their hands got dirty with soil and saplings and turned out a riot of colour and newness to the spaces. People from outside Bangalore took back MSB's design ideas.
Ask how they ‘sold' their green ideas to nearly 200 individuals, a few restaurants, hotels, offices and as corporate gifts (“we have not kept count”), and former Infoscian Chengappa is herself puzzled about it. “None of us - Shailesh Deshpande (former Web designer), Athreya Chidambi or Sriram Aravamudan - ever targeted a market, had a marketing budget or even knew how to do it. We never had the money to do those things.” (They have no designations, either.)
First came two pilot gardens costing Rs 5,000 each. With a Rs 5-lakh capital, they floated a page on FB, painted the gallery and worked with architects and builders, exhibited at a FabIndia exhibition and then it poured in. Their corporate workshops spread the word and the gift coupons for new home-owners are picking up. After a Zen theme, a Mediterranean medley and many makeovers, it was peak hour at Diwali and Christmas, says Chengappa.
Admittedly there was no method. “Things came together to work for us.
It is all organically evolving.” Now the calls for products are increasing and soon, there is to be a retail outlet for garden things designed and made by the MSB brigade. One must-have now: a professional photographer.