Futurewagon DIY Crafts: Pitching and Owning a New Category

Samyukta came to Futurewagon with a pitch, not a job application. Through her own research, she had identified the DIY crafts category as a growing opportunity in both India and the US, and she believed Futurewagon was the best-positioned Indian company to lead it. She approached the founder directly, proposed the mandate, and asked to own it end to end.

Futurewagon is a 10 to 15 person team with limited resources. The founder needed someone who could operate without hand-holding, and Samyukta had already done the work to understand the market before the conversation began. Her personal interest in DIY crafts, combined with observations from her travels in Southeast Asia, had given her early conviction that the category was gaining momentum.

Once the engagement was agreed, she mapped the market for DIY crafts in India and globally, assessed Futurewagon's capabilities and constraints, and built the entry strategy. She evaluated the category from both the demand side and the company's operational reality, identifying which product lines were viable for a first entry.

Rather than launching everything at once, she shortlisted a set of SKUs and structured a pilot to test which products would resonate before committing to scale. The pilot approach was deliberate: in a new category with limited data, learning fast mattered more than launching perfectly.

The result is Futurewagon's first entry into the US market and its first move into the DIY crafts category, both happening simultaneously through the product launch currently in progress.