Bonito Designs|The Designs That Tell Your Story
Making one’s unique personality speak through the designs Sameer AM the Artisan with finesse skills of interior designing fulfills the visions behind every art he paints through his creative and innovative ideas. He is the founder of BONITO DESIGNS, which brings dreams into reality through the designs they create. The founder says,
“Decorating a home is no more done by looking through numerous catalogs. It is about making one’s unique personality speak through the space they live in.”
At Bonito Designs, they focus on bringing to life a bespoke area that tells a story about the possessor of the space, and where he and his family do not just live. However, they are able to thrive, rejuvenate, and eventually get in touch with their blissful self for a much more meaningful life.
Bonito Designs is a professional design firm started by young entrepreneurs building on design obsession and a vision that every home deserves to be a designer home, and every person deserves designer living. A design talent powerhouse with high caliber design experts from across Indian and International design schools. With a team of 200+ passionate individuals, they have a cumulative experience of 400 man-years of design & delivery. 1500 homes delivered in the last 7 years across the city of Bengaluru while garnering praises, awards, and expertise across various typologies, sizes, and themes. A full-service offering from conceptualization to design, planning, visualization, and project management with utmost care of personalization and quality delivery.
Sameer was born in Bijapur of North Karnataka, and he hails from a rather conservative and lower-middle-class family. Despite his financial struggle, he grew up to be a dreamer and never gave up chasing his dreams.
Sameer AM, the face and founder of the brand, pursued Computer Science at SJCE, Mysore, after completing his schooling from Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, Shimoga. It is his inquisitive mind that drove him to a network marketing company during his college days. He became a part of several leadership workshops, conducted seminars, and personally trained prospective learners. This experience allowed Sameer to acquire essential people management skills, helped him understand and tackle cultural barriers, and improved his delegation abilities, a trait that kept him in good stead for the future challenges to be faced during Bonito Design’s inception.
Sameer had his heart set on entrepreneurship. He waited for the right time and opportunity, and along with a few friends, kick-started Bonito Designs in 2012.
With the constant dedication of the promoters of this organization, Sameer AM – Chief Executive Officer Rickson Dsouza – Chief Operating Officer, Arun Kumar Gonal – Chief Human Resource Officer, Bharath S – Chief Design Officer and Pradeep Bhat – Chief Technology Officer, the Design Firm today has achieved many milestones. A glimpse of their achievements is-
- 1500 homes delivered in the last 7 years across the city of Bengaluru.
- Bonito was awarded the “Best and Most Innovative Interior Design Firm of the Year 2020” India Award under “Residential Projects” and 40 under 40 Best Interior Designers of India 2020 by National Architecture and Interior Design Excellence Awards 2020
- Commonfloor – Best Interior Design Company of the Year 2019
Reference – https://youtu.be/BgEHg25GHdA
- Houzz – Best of Houzz 2014
Reference – https://www.houzz.in/pro/sam2san/bonito-designs
In recent months, Bonito has collaborated with NIFT Mumbai to help them revise their curriculum for Interior Designing as per the industry. To familiarize final year students with hands-on industry training, Bonito conducted a design competition where the winners would get the opportunity to intern with Bonito Design in Bangalore for a duration of six months.
Speaking about the challenges faced in the professional career, the founder speaks,
“Bonito Designs is that one place where I can give due credit on having me challenged on a lot of different levels.”
Setting up his own business and being a co-promoter-driven business, managing each other’s expectations, and changing business dynamics was and continues to be a juggling act for the designer. Harder has been keeping ears and eyes to the ground to know deeply what it is that their customer looks for, and not any less than a mirage, the imagery keeps changing.
He adds,
“It was an immense challenge to come to learn the unchanging principles around which great customer satisfaction hinge.”
Over the years, team Bonito has surpassed the initial challenges that any start-up comes across – from acquiring the first client to gaining visibility in the market. Along the way, the team has made friends with the market, and the eco-system yet believes in walking lengthy roads.Sameer says,
“If you look at interiors, it is an amalgamation of hundreds of thousands of various disciplines formed together as one solution or one product. And how exactly do you align all of these people who are motivated either by business or by money to be customer-centric remains vital puzzle to be cracked.
Despite having built the best of the systems in place, we still have an odd unsatisfied customer at the end of the pipeline because someone somewhere did not align. This has always been a significant challenge for us. One more challenge is once you systemize something, you are running the risk of being monotonous. We make sure to continually innovate and bring something new for the people while at the same time not breaking the enlisting systems and traffic.”
Their values and guiding principles, such as honesty and transparency, have been vital to gain initial traction. In an industry that is plagued by opaque operations and accountability, they were able to garner high confidence by merely being direct with what could be done and what couldn’t. Customers appreciated the directness with which they did business.
The founder says,
“We took these values above the business itself, and at times, it meant rejecting business in certain cases. The word of mouth publicity, along with the popularity of our YouTube channel, has been a large push to take our business to the next level.”
The recent couple of quarters have demanded a totally different approach to increasing their customer base. It required a combination of building up of various verticals such as partnering with realty networks and agents to convert them into evangelists of the brand, and that too has added to the business’s intake capacity of the customers. As of date, the team continues to experiment and explore various ways in which they can increase the engagement with their customer base, and they believe in growing more reliable than before.
Expressing about his primary learning from his professional and personal journey, Sameer states,
“In Bonito Designs, the personal and professional dimension of my life has been intertwined with blurred borders. A lot of professional learnings spill into the personal aspects of life and vice versa. My experiences through this journey have made me realize deeply the interconnected nature of life that we live in. The butterfly effects, laws of impermanence, and laws of attraction are applied and explored daily. I’ve also come to realize deeply to wake into a non-judgemental and always curious mindset to stay open to learn and teach on a day to day basis. It pays to listen; It blesses to care, and It is a bliss to be.”Sameer is an exemplary entrepreneur to all aspiring entrepreneurs and designers who dream of building their identity despite struggles and limited support. We definitely need to learn a lot from his experience. He suggests,
The only advice I can leave anyone for that matter is a single word – ‘fearlessness’ – please note; it is not ‘fearless.’ We are all mortals, and we all go through the dreaded fear. ‘Fearlessness’ is the quality or aspect of you, which sees the fear that you go through for what it is! An emotion. When looked from that place, you begin to practice fearlessness, wherein you start stepping outside of the limits the fear puts you in; and you suddenly discover that there were no rules out there ever!
In the last one year, the company has grown tremendously in terms of size of revenues, no of homes delivered, employees (from 65 to 220+). Having delivered over 1500+ homes in 7 years in Bangalore, they are rightly placed to expand their services to other markets soon. In terms of capacity, their production and execution capabilities have increased to multi-fold in the last 6 months, and they are equipped to deliver over 1000 homes in Bangalore this year.
Indeed, tremendous enlightening is the journey of Sameer AM and his firm Bonito Designs.
For more information visit – https://bonito.in/
Designs & Stories , Bangalore wishes all the very best for his and his team’s future endeavors!
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