I am Dushyant Sethiya, entrepreneur and graduate of University of Cambridge (UK), and University of Leeds (UK). I co-founded “The Puppeters”, a t-shirt brand to spread optimism via our t-shirt designs, with my younger brother Pallav Sethiya who is a computer science engineer.
Why “The Puppeters”?
According to the last year’s World Health organization (WHO) report:
“In India, there are more than 5 crore Indians suffered from depression and 3 crore from anxiety disorder and also says it will be the leading cause of disability globally by 2030.”
This is an alarming health concern not only in India but across the globe. This can be widely seen from teens to the elderly people.
WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan says “These new figures are a wake-up call for all countries to re-think their approach to mental health and to treat it with the urgency that it deserves,”
According to the Today.com Website, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Prince Harry recently teamed up to fight mental illness via raising awareness to fight pessimism and stay positive.
Kate Middleton (Duchess of Cambridge) during her speech said many people fear admitting that they struggle with depression and stress and this can destroy their families and hence their lives.
And her husband Prince William (Duke of Cambridge) said these problems lie at the heart of some of our greatest social challenges.
How it got started?
We are entrepreneurs and what we have seen so far is that struggle is part of everyday life.
In order to stay positive, people take positivity from different sources such as positive messages, movies, or listening to motivational speakers. And we found an interesting fact about optimism that once you are in touch of it, it replicates itself and kills negativity which bothers you.
Once someone gets an optimist outlook, his mindset gets changed and hence his energy level to fight negativity.
Believe me when I say everyone has experienced depression or stress at least once in their life and with “The Puppeters” we aim to target depression and bring optimism in people’s lives via our t-shirts.
How are people responding?
We came up with this idea of printing positive messages on t-shirts and thought to give it a try. So we made first few t-shirt designs under our brand name “The Puppeters” and registered them and then made them available on Amazon India website.
In a month’s time we sold 100+ t-shirts and since then we were getting frequent orders. That was the moment we knew it will work and we got to work to roll out more t-shirt designs.
Some of our bestselling designs are:
Make Good Things Possible, Live Laugh Love, Yoga Every Day, Good Vibes Only, and Positive Mind Positive Vibes Positive Life.
( our t shirts are currently available at amazon.in)
Currently we have a portfolio of 350+ designs and are sold only via Amazon.in and official Facebook Page. In the near future, we have plans to launch our own website and do tie-ups with different online and offline channels.