Fascinatingly Deddimag!

'Deddimag' is the term usually reserved for the halfwits. By using it to name their start-up venture Vasireddy Hareesh Chowdary and Mahi Illindra set the precedent to think beyond the normal, and conceptualise and create products that appeal to the youngsters and the young at heart.

Hailing from Khammam and Ongole respectively, the two engineering brains, whose hearts are set on their mother tongue and Telugu cinema turned their course to do something unique.

They began by writing scripts and while doing so, their thoughts steered towards creating 'Deddimag', a merchandise company, which is famous for its dialogue captioned T-shirts straight out of popular Telugu films that have attained a cult status of their own.

Mahi narrated the story of how 'Deddimag' started, "I have done my engineering from Bangalore and Hareesh has done it in Hyderabad. We have a common interest in writing for films and I met Hareesh through one of my common friends.

We spoke for more than an hour, which was about two years ago, and then decided to do something together. We have written for a few web series and films, and in this whole process we happened to see a few websites like bewakuf.com that had a touch of regional language on their t- shirts.

We thought, why we can't try something like this in Telugu? We wanted to test the waters, and so we shared this idea with our friends, who found it interesting. We began by doing proper research on getting the best quality t shirts from Tamil Nadu."

"We started with the word 'Fasak', which was trending and slowly we started writing all the familiar dialogues from the Telugu movies and now we have 600 different varieties of dialogues with us. After looking at our website there are people from Kannada and Tamil, who want to partner with us," they add.

Starting the whole process in the month of December 2018, they have had good number of sales for their t-shirts, "When we started it for the first time, it used to be just friends, who were our customers.

We would sell two to four t-shirts a day. Now we are flooded with orders. We get around 250 orders per day. We haven't spent too much on advertising - it is all word of mouth and the Facebook and Instagram page that we have."

The techies-turned businessmen duo automated the processes to ensure a better work-flow and efficiency in their operations. "We are primarily IT guys and so we have built the whole technology from top to bottom.

Instead of working in the traditional way, we manage to do our business in a smart way. So, we built systems that connect everybody. In this process, when you place an order a copy comes to us, the printing guy and t- shirt guy. It is all automated and once the order is placed it is delivered to the customer directly."

The strength of 'Deddimag' is also innovative designs. After coming up with around 2000 patterns of t-shirts, the duo now hopes to connect with celebrities to market their product. "We want celebrities to wear our t-shits and endorse our brand.

We currently have half sleeve t-shirts for men and women; we are also coming up with t-shirts for kids, and funky boxers for all age groups, cell phone covers and hoodies."

This being the season of IPL, the team is also coming up with t-shirts with funny liners that would cheer the Hyderabad Sunrisers team fans and cricket buffs in general.

The price range of these t-shirts starts at around Rs 299 and goes till Rs 499 per piece. "People can buy these t-shirts online on Facebook, Instagram and from our web page Deddimag.com. We can also customize T-shirts for special occasions like Bachelorette party," they add.