Yashika, in the making
Independent · Self-initiated speculative concept The Counted Days Gazette Sold Wrong / 01 — Agra · 2026

Independent · Self-initiated speculative concept · Not commissioned

Building a brand from a blank page.

Can the same hands, the same stone and the same six weeks of work be sold as design instead of as a souvenir — without changing the craft at all?

▶Watch the storySold Wrong / 01 — Agra

Parchin statement lamp concept with floral marble inlay
ParchinProject
Taj GanjParchin Kari · Agra
2026Yashika Agarwal
ConceptNot commissioned, not affiliated

Brand strategy · Naming · Identity · Packaging · Retail · Campaign · Go-to-market · Unit economics

★ Sourced figure · ◆ Modelled figure

The story behind the slides

A little story about a very real problem.

An illustrated short, written from this case study. Independent, self-initiated concept. Not commissioned, approved or affiliated with UNESCO. Modelled figures are marked. Illustrations, narration and music were made with AI tools; every fact comes from the case study below.

Read the transcript

The craft that built the Taj Mahal earns less than the guides who point at it.

It's called Parchin Kari. Stone, cut by hand and set into marble so flush you can run a finger across a flower and feel nothing.

It survives in Taj Ganj, a few hundred metres from the Taj. Income depends on tourists. Younger people are moving away. And UNESCO found only fourteen percent of artisans sell online.

The technique isn't the problem. The channel is. Picture the gate: a hot day, a seller calling out, no maker's name, and a bargain both sides expect. The pavement sets the price, not the stone.

So I modelled a pair of coasters. About five days of hand work, and nine hundred rupees of stone and marble. At the gate, they go for four to nine hundred. The labour is effectively free. The artisan is subsidising the stone.

Then I found a clue. As a teenager, an artisan called Asif delivered a six-foot inlaid table to the ITC Mughal hotel in Agra. It sold almost immediately, for seven lakh eighty thousand rupees. Same craft. Same hands. A hotel instead of a pavement.

One sale isn't a market. But it's proof it can happen. Nobody haggles over a signature. Give a piece its maker's name, and buyers compare it to design, not souvenirs. So don't change the craft. Change where the value lives.

So I built a concept. My own, not a commission. It's called Parchin, the craft's own word. Every piece carries its maker's name and its working days. A price can be negotiated. A number of days can't.

Then there's a test you can do with your eyes shut. Real inlay is flush. Resin and machine work leave a seam. Touch both, and you know. An educated buyer protects a craft better than a certificate does.

The model even cut our easiest product. Coasters take about five days of hand work, and on my numbers their price can fund less than one. So, no coasters. The bigger question I'm leaving open: would the money really reach the artisan? I'd rather leave that open than pretend I've solved it.

Sold Wrong / 01 — Agra

Contemporary Indian design, made by the last workshops of a four-hundred-year-old technique.

The brief

The craft that built the Taj Mahal earns less than the guides who point at it.

What was happeningThe craft

This isn’t a new technique.

Parchin Kari. Pietra dura. Semi-precious stone, cut by hand and set flush into marble. So flush that you can run a finger across a flower and feel nothing.

14%★of artisans sell online
68%★still work with outdated techniques
83★artisans linked to welfare schemes

The technique lives on in Taj Ganj, a few hundred metres from the Taj Mahal, through descendants of the original workshops. Income depends heavily on tourist footfall. Younger generations are moving away from the craft.

★ UNESCO, World Heritage & Local Communities programme, Taj Ganj, 2025

What wasn’t workingThe channel

The channel sets the price ceiling.
Not the craft.

An inlaid plate at the Taj gate is bought at the end of a hot day, from a man calling out to someone already walking, after a negotiation both sides expect, with no name attached. Every element of that setting is engineered to end in a bargain.

The stone doesn’t set the price. The pavement does.

A dark Agra lane at dusk
What wasn’t workingThe gate arithmetic

The labour is effectively free.

Real hand-inlay work, coaster pair5 days ◆
Stone and marble₹900 ◆
Typical gate price₹400 to ₹900
Implied artisan day rateminus ₹100 to zero

the artisan is subsidising the stone.

₹0per artisan-day, floored at zero
₹500material cost still unpaid

Arithmetic from the copy: max(₹0, (gate price − ₹900) ÷ 5 days). Across this entire range, nothing remains for labour. The original negative day rate is retained above; this display floors it at zero and shows the material shortfall separately. ◆ Modelled illustration, not verified artisan earnings.

The “Hmm...”

Nobody haggles
over a signature.

The moment an object carries a maker’s name, the buyer stops comparing it to the other souvenirs on the same street and starts comparing it to other design. The reference set changes. The price follows.

The receiptsIt has already happened once.

₹7,80,000★

Same craft.
Same hands.
A hotel instead of a pavement.

As a teenager, the artisan Asif delivered a six-foot inlaid table to Agra’s ITC Mughal Hotel. It sold almost immediately — and in UNESCO’s words, “the actual cost was only a fraction of that amount.” ★

One documented sale is an existence proof, not a market. Validating it properly needs buyer interviews at both the gate and a design retailer.

The moveNaming · Identity · Concept

Parchin

The craft’s own word. Plain, ownable, and it teaches the category every time someone says it out loud.

Don’t change the craft.
Change what it means to buy it.

Carnelian
Lapis
Jade
Marble
The making · The brand device

Count the days.

41 DAYSRAFIQ AHMEDNO. 4 OF 12

Every piece carries its working time and its maker. A price can be negotiated. A number of days cannot. It shifts the question from what is this worth to me to what did this cost someone.

Illustrative maker attribution and edition stamp · concept, not a production record.

The making · Packaging concept
Parchin · Count the days.

The box is the certificate.

There is no separate piece of paper to lose.

The making · The second layerThe touch test

Close your eyes and run your finger across it.

Move across either surface, swipe sideways, or press a tile to hold the test open. Keyboard: Tab, then Enter or Space. The resin clip is a real resin fill; the inlay image is the concept piece.

Try the surface comparison

Real Parchin Kari is flush. Resin and machine work leave a seam. You can feel the difference with your eyes shut.

One gesture doing three jobs — the sensory experience, the authentication test, and the counterfeit defence. An educated buyer protects a craft better than a certificate does.

The making · The rangeModelled · ◆

Capacity first.

12 pairs of hands. 240 working days each. 2,880 artisan-days available in year one. ◆

Parchin paperweight concept
Paperweight
Parchin entryway tray concept
Entryway tray
Parchin basic table lamp concept
Table lamp
Parchin statement lamp concept
Statement lamp
Parchin inlaid table top concept
Table top
◆ Modelled range · Days / wage / retail / year 1 units
ProductDaysWageRetailUnits
Paperweight · single motif2₹1,700₹6,000120
Entryway tray · bordered6₹5,100₹17,000100
Table lamp · basic6₹5,100₹20,000115
Table lamp · statement16₹13,600₹51,50045
Table top · edition of 1241₹34,850₹1,28,00012

The basic lamp is the volume piece. The statement lamp is the thing that gets photographed. Marble is translucent. Light it from within and the flowers read like stained glass.

The making · The product we had to dropCoasters

The argument against our own easiest first sale.

A hand-inlaid coaster set~5 artisan-days ◆
At ₹850 a day ◆₹4,250 in wages alone
Accessible retail for coasters₹3,000–₹5,000
Labour the price can fundUnder 1 day

Coasters are the obvious entry SKU and every craft brand sells them. This one can’t. Working out why was the most useful thing the model did.

so we drop it.

The receipts · Modelled, not achievedYear one · ◆

This is a supply-led plan,
not a demand-led one.

₹70.3L ◆Net revenue, year one
33.2% ◆Of net revenue paid to artisans — published, not claimed
95% ◆Artisan capacity used — 2,742 of 2,880 days
1 : 4.5 ◆₹21,112 AOV · ₹4,645 CAC

392 units is not an estimate of the market. It is what twelve pairs of hands can make in a year. ◆

◆ ₹34.1L COGS · ₹36.2L gross profit · 51.4% gross margin · ₹23.3L artisan wages · ~333 customers · ₹15.5L marketing budget · 22% of net revenue

Measurement — what would tell us this is working?

So what? · Measurement

What would tell us this is actually working?

The ceiling moves
Average selling price vs Taj-gate benchmark
The maker gains
% of revenue going to artisans
It isn’t a souvenir
Share of sales to buyers outside Agra
Scarcity is working
Queue depth + time-to-sell-out
Pre-orders fund production
% artisan cost covered by pre-order revenue
Education is landing
Waitlist signups from “Spot the Fake” + AI-answer citations
It has a second life
Repeat purchase + collector-registry conversion
The craft survives
Artisans onboarded + under-30s entering workshops

The last one is the one that matters in ten years.

The making · Go-to-market conceptPhase 01 · Months 1–3

Prove the ceiling moves.

Own site plus two or three curated design retailers. Not Amazon — Amazon is a souvenir channel for this category and would rebuild the exact ceiling this brand exists to escape.

Parchin website concept mockup

Drops, not a catalogue.

Three to four designs per collection. Limited, numbered runs. When they’re gone: they’re gone. Hand production cannot scale like factory production. Parchin doesn’t hide that constraint. It turns the constraint into the product.

The wait is the proposition.

Made to order. 41 days. Seven pieces ahead of you. Ships approximately 12 November.

Hero pieces: numbered editions. 12 pieces. 1 → 12. Never 13. The edition closes. Customers pre-order.

◆ Budget: ₹4.64L · Brand: ₹3.25L · Performance: ₹1.39L
Targets: 2,500 waitlist · 70% sell-through · 6 press pickups · 1.2% CVR

The making · Retail & audiencesPhase 02 · Months 4–9

Own the gifting season.

The store isn’t the experience. The fixture is.

Phase One: a branded bay inside two or three design retailers.

Real inlay × resin copy

Two identical pieces. One real. One not. Touch both. Don’t take our word for it.

Distribution is deliberately scarce. Not by owning stores — that is capital before proof — but by choosing few partners and saying no to the rest.

Not tourists.

The furnisher. Owns or is renovating a home. Already buys brands such as Nicobar, Good Earth and Jaipur Rugs. She wants provenance she can explain to a guest in one sentence.

The wedding gifter. An occasion purchase at a price she may not spend furnishing her own home. The gift needs to look expensive and mean something.

Corporate gifting. Secondary audience. An underserved space between craft and corporate plaque.

◆ Budget: ₹6.96L · Brand: ₹4.87L · Performance: ₹2.09L
Targets: 45% gifting revenue share · ₹21,100 AOV · ₹4,645 CAC

The making · Go-to-market conceptPhase 03 · Months 10–24

Scale the name.
Not the output.

Export, museum and design-store retail, then architectural specification — a different buyer, a different sales cycle, arguably a different company.

One new designer.

Launch collection: one named Indian designer. New pattern. Four-hundred-year-old technique. That friction is the product.

From Collection Two: open design competition with NIFT · NID · SRISHTI. Winner is credited and paid. And the artisan is credited alongside the designer.

Not a courtesy.
A condition.

If the designer gets the name and the maker doesn’t, the brief has recreated the problem it was supposed to solve.

No gated membership at launch. Instead: waitlist per drop. Collector registry. Every piece numbered. Owners registered. First access to the next collection.

◆ Budget: ₹3.87L · Brand: ₹2.71L · Performance: ₹1.16L
Targets: Top-3 AI citations · 35% registry conversion · 18% repeat · 12% export

The making · Campaign conceptsGrowth later first

Nobody searches for “marble inlay tray”.

There is no existing demand to harvest, so performance spend has nothing to capture. Demand has to be manufactured before it can be harvested — which makes brand budget first not the noble choice but the only functional one.

Parchin blue lamp campaign concept
The lamp · light through marble · campaign concept
Parchin paperweight campaign concept on a dark field
Paperweight · a design object · campaign concept
Parchin Count the Days lamp campaign concept
Count the days · lamp · campaign concept
Parchin touch-test campaign concept
Spot the fake · the touch test · campaign concept
Parchin Count the Days paperweight campaign concept
Count the days · paperweight · campaign concept
Parchin Not Silver wedding-gifting campaign concept
Wedding gifting · not silver · campaign concept
Parchin Seven Pieces Ahead of You campaign concept
Seven pieces ahead · the wait · campaign concept
70% ◆

Growth Later

Brand · PR · Content · Education
₹10.83L ◆
Ring-fenced first.

30% ◆

Growth Now

Search · CRO · Retargeting
₹4.64L ◆
Whatever remains.

The making · The filmConcept

Don’t just show the object.
Show what it cost to make.

The Making, a ten-second craft film: setting the stone, the pattern, the finished lamp. Illustrative reconstruction, not footage of a recorded making session.

41 days.

One flower, one artisan, fixed camera, time-lapse. No voiceover until the final frame.

Two more pillars: “Spot the fake” — how to tell inlay from resin, the most useful content in the category and nobody owns it. And “What to gift at an Indian wedding that isn’t silver.”

If people ask a machine, Parchin should have an answer.

The education content is also the GEO strategy. People increasingly ask a model rather than a search box, and structured, factual writing is what those systems surface — so the most honest content is also the most discoverable.

Not travel creators. Interior design. Architecture. Home. Design. License the best content and run it as paid creative.

What I’d do differentlyThe strategy has questions.

What this brand will not do.

  • No phantom stock counters.

    If ten are available, ten are shown. No fake countdowns. No invented scarcity. No fake waitlists.

  • No pity.

    Guilt does not buy a ₹20,000 lamp. The decline of the craft should be communicated with dignity.

  • No “affordable luxury”.

    It caps the price, and the artisan’s margin is the first thing squeezed when the price is capped.

Can artisan income splits be verified?

Not without fieldwork. Real launch → artisan interviews first.

Can design collaboration become extraction?

Yes. Co-credit isn’t a courtesy. It’s a condition.

Counterfeits

Education is a defence. Not a guarantee.

Drops limit revenue

Deliberately. This is not a year-one scale-curve story. Pretending otherwise would make the strategy weaker.

The question I can’t answer yet

Who actually
owns the value?

Would the money really reach the artisan? Or would Parchin simply create another intermediary?

That depends entirely on the ownership model. A cooperative structure may answer that question better than a brand-owned structure. It may also be harder to fund.

I would rather leave that question open than pretend the strategy has solved it.

The proposition — where the value moves

So what? · The proposition

Don’t change the craft.
Change where the value lives.

Souvenir→ Design
Anonymous→ Named
Bargained→ Priced
Tourist→ Collector
Invisible labour→ Counted labour
Pavement→ Design retail
One-off sale→ Relationship

Parchin · Sold Wrong / 01 — Agra

41 days.
One maker.
One piece.
No thirteenth.

Contemporary Indian design, made by the last workshops of a four-hundred-year-old technique.

The honest noteIndependent, speculative and self-initiated. Not commissioned, not approved, not affiliated with UNESCO, who do not endorse commercial ventures — their published research is cited here as evidence of a market failure. ★ marks a sourced figure, ◆ a modelled one.