First, the biggie!
We are introducing super sized teddy bear for all you valentine love birds. The teddy is about 3 ft. tall and wears a t-shirt which bears your picture or message. And going by the hugs he’s getting from the girl in the picture below (thanks Bulbul for posing!), they already love it.

It’s a no-brainer girls love teddies (See What Girls Say) . Moreover even Himanshu, our design team member, fancies them and gladly poses away :P (No, he was neither threatened, nor promised any perks to do this – he willingly volunteered!)

When they say love is in the air, we say, well let’s make it a little more real – love is in the bear! So gift your valentine a super-teddy and get ready for super smiles and super hugs!

While we won’t tell you (just yet) what we have in store for you this new year, we bring you back some calendar themes that had gone missing, such as the rich black Colored Strings, the super fun Creature Creep, the paintsy Pastels and some more. Most of these are available across different calendar styles: Desk, Split, Wide and Wall.

And guess what, we give you a blog-and-social-media-exclusive offer of 15% discount on all calendars valid till 30 November. Use the coupon code CAL15OFF on the shopping cart to avail this offer.

Ready to make some calendars?

Note: Photos for this post are courtesy of Photos India.

Besides the unique Diwali Photo Candle and offers we have for you (which are ending soon – so hurry :) ), we recently introduced three interesting new products:

The photo personalised Piggy Bank (or गुल्लक as we call it in Hindi),

This is made of ceramic and about the size of the classic white coffee mug we sell at itasveer.

A photo tray

This one’s a wooden tray with a black finish. Your design’s printed on the metal plaque that is fitted in the centre.

and the rather unique Silver mug

This one’s a 330 ml ceramic with a silver finish.

So which one’s it gonna be? Are you going to save with the photo piggy bank , serve on a personalised tray or sip in a sparkling coffee mug?

8″x8″ Standard Square, starts @ Rs. 1399 for 20 pages (sides)

8″x10″ Standard Landscape, starts @ Rs. 1499 for 20 pages (sides)

Both sizes available with the following specifications

• Hard cover
• Perfect binding
• 170gsm gloss paper with Satin-matte lamination.

Let me just run you through the process of designing photobooks real quick (most of you who’ve already used Doodlepad will be right at home)

Step 1. Select your size and other preferences

Step 2. Select your theme and the book will load up with blank placeholders

Step 3. Select the photos you want to add from the photos panel. You can also use your Flickr and Picasa photos directly from here

Step 4. Now just start dragging and dropping photos on to the placeholders. If you don’t even want to do that, just press auto fill and let Doodlepad fill up your photos across all pages

Step 5. Add your captions. Or add whole stories. Go wild!

Step 6. Voila! Your book is ready to be printed. You can flip through the pages in the preview. Make sure you haven’t missed out and left any pages blank.

Step 7. Take out your credit card and ka’ching! Sit back, relax and let us work the magic now. We promise to awe :)

So if you’re still wondering why you’d want a photobook at all, here are a few ideas. They’re great for keeping travelogues of your trips, complete with the photos you clicked on the way. You’re a budding photographer? then these are absolutely lovely for a printed portfolio that you can conveniently carry around. You’re a parent? how about a book of your kid’s birthday. Moms.. perhaps you’d want to do your own recipe book with all the sumptuous photos of your cooking! Not to mention the great Indian wedding lends itself particularly well to be captured in such books. Or maybe just your honeymoon. Well we could go on and on about the ideas. Also if you have a custom request, do not hesitate to contact us via our contact form here.

Feedback is very much awaited as always. Happy photobooking!

If you want splendid hardbound coffee-table books with your own photos, wait no more (Okay, just a few more days) !

Here is ours. Freedom to us so far has meant pursuing the path we choose in our lives. But we didn’t confer this freedom unto ourselves. We didn’t make the colleges we went to or the jobs that our parents had with which they paid for our education. We’re enabled by the opportunities and choices that our India has let us have. Standing on the shoulders of everyone doing their two bits to make things work, India has grown and given us a broad horizon to think and play with. Everybody working to make that deadline, or protect that two inches of land from prying enemies, or educate that child is earning all of us one more bit of freedom with every single act.

It’s not sung about but every small extra effort you put to make things work is heroic. That’s when you exercise your Freedom to make things happen.

On a lighter note, itasveer is our attempt to give you a new freedom. Freedom to gift. So we try our best to give you the most choices and the best of customizable gifts that are made especially to make somebody feel special.

Out now is our exclusive two day 15% site wide discount on the occassion of 15th August. You can use the coupon code IDAY09 to avail of this offer. Vande matram!

It’s a beta release, and we guys have been keeping track of all the feedback you are sending us. Expect a blog post on the new doodlepad soon.

In the meantime, we wanted to tell about a cool product you can buy online at itasveer this Rakshabandhan – the photo personalised Rakhi!

Along with lots of mithai, family bonding and fun (and bhaailog ending with much lighter pockets) -  make this Rakhshabandhan special with the Photo Rakhi from itasveer.

It comes in a special Rakhi pack with roli-chawal and is Rs. 99 only including shipping and taxes!

Plus, you also get free shipping on all personalised products at itasveer (except prints, mounts and collages) till 5th Aug with the discount code ‘RAKHI2009’.

So, ready to shop ?

Continuing our tradition of our yearly birthday photo (see here and here), here’s our latest. And ofcourse there’s three of us each in this one. This took almost the entire day to create. Well worth the effort I’d say.

Cheers to all of you! Thanks for being with us in this tremendous journey so far. Nothing more to say.. I’ll just part with the line – “the best is yet to come” :)

Let me put some more background to this post. Basically when we started off, we were a bunch of half learned, not too good engineers (and knew even less about running a business). Infact, that is putting it modestly.. we were outright poor in a lot of aspects (i know, yikes!). But one thing that we knew well was getting things done. So inspite of the fact that we made the poorest of design choices, we made sure everything worked well enough! And I can only say all that in retrospect as we were mighty sure we were doing things right all along at that time :) I also think that belief and confidence contributed in large parts to getting things to work as well! But as we’ve learned our crafts and business along the way, we’ve come to know that those bad decisions have started weighing us down in a lot of ways that hamper productivity/scalability of our day to day operations. We’ve also learned the various shortcomings of our service by all the generous feedback that you guys have always sent our way. We’ve continued to make incremental improvements, but we’ve grown more ambitious now and we think its time for something bigger.

Luckily we’ve put ourselves in a position where we can afford to look at everything from scratch and get to the drawing board. By the way, the lucky position being that we are an operationally profitable business now. And there’s no venture funding baggage with us yet.. so we can afford to think in a free manner about how we’d like to evolve iTasveer in the future. So admirers and haters, this might be a great time to chime in with any more feedback you have for us. We promise to listen to it all and we’ll try and make the right decisions. We promise to keep the user at the center of all our design decisions and will not hamper user experience at the cost of doing something cheaply or easily, to the best of our ability.

Work has been on on all this since the past 6 months and is moving along at a fair pace.. the new stuff will start arriving 2-3 months down the line. The changes will most likely be incremental and not a sudden unveiling. First up in line is a revamped Doodlepad.

That’s all folks.. wish us luck, and ofcourse, tell us if you have a wishlist :)

Obligatory nutty picture: Nishant and Ashish at war at one of the drawing boards.. the sketch pen is mightier than the sword