Silaii’s mission to make sculptures a part of everyday life

Arun Titan founded Silaii in 2019 with the aim to bring out collectibles for politics, movies, and sports.

In June this year, the popular Kannada movie KGF got its own collectible series. These pieces—sculptured to perfection—give KGF fans a chance to take home a miniature version of their favourite characters for as much as an Rs 999.

This is new for the Indian entertainment space. Movie collectibles don’t have an extensive market in the country, unlike globally – where the scene is dynamic and apparent.

While it seemed like a lucrative market to get into, the idea propped up when Arun Titan began contemplating what he would like to do. For him, art and artistic skills always came first. During school, he recalls, while he had trouble with words and text, the visual language came easy.

“But I was very confident about my artistic skills and had always had an inclination toward visual language,” he says, speaking to YS Life in Tamil. It would, however, be during college when he would be introduced to sculptures for the first time.

Now, Arun has dedicated all of his time to building out a business through sculpture. His company, Silaii offers uniquely sculpted pieces both made in-house and custom-made.

In the beginning

Silaii, which means sculptures in Tamil, set out in 2019. At the time, it came out with its first set of sculptures based on Periyar and then of former Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu—CN Annadurai, M Karunanidhi, and J Jayalalitha. “All these made me realise, the most spoken topics in India are politics, movies, and sports,” Arun shares. “I knew this was where I would be able to build a business.”

Soon, it moved on to making pieces of other icons like Ashoka Pillar, Valluvar, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Dr BR Ambedkar, Gautama Buddha, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahakavi Bharathiyar, and Kannada actor Puneeth Rajkumar. Arun says, he bagged the right to do a movie collectible for the Tamil Movie Master, after which came the KGF merchandise.

What sets Silaii apart is the artistry. Each of its sculptures, painstakingly made by hand, are made of a special kind of moulding material consisting of a mixture of stone, usually granite, finely ground into powder, along with other materials that make it pliable to be sculpted.

Life before sculpture

For Arun, before sculpting came photography. His job as an animator at Zoho seemed to ignite a spark for the visual medium. He found significant success as a photographer–from being welcomed to the Angkor photo festival in Cambodia in 2012 to quickly moving into photography full-time.

He quit his corporate job and established himself as a celebrity photographer, even landing a gig as AR Rahman’s personal photographer. Somehow, along the way, he struggled to make this passion into a business. While he no longer continues the profession full-time, it is still an integral part of his life besides Silaii.

A momentary spark

As is common, Arun, too, has had ups and downs in his entrepreneurial journey. For him, the highest point came through a very special order. As he tells it, a Chennai-based doctor wanted a sculpture of her father. This, she instructed him, should be appropriate to be kept outside her hospital.

Soon, Arun got to work. Once he handed over the completed sculpture, the customer appeared to exit the room. This puzzled him, he recalls, because he assumed that the work offended the client. Soon, she returned back into the room with a response.

“She told me that the sculpture brought her father back to life,” he says, adding that the sculpture reminded her of why she began her journey as a doctor in the first place.

Moments like these remind Arun why he began his journey as a sculptor in the first place.

Of course, the journey was ignited by a small gift he received from his university’s principal when he went to attend a workshop. This principal Chandru Guruswamy was a sculptor himself. He handed Arun a Periyar sculpture, which he stored in his collection.

As he held the sculpture in his hands, it was a moment of realisation—one that would change the course of his business.

That moment sparked the idea of introducing collectibles, which is still central to Silaii’s vision. It has sold over 15,000 sculptures through the website besides the customise and bulk orders. The company's customised orders range from Rs 699 and can go up to Rs 1 lakh on average.

Making a mark

Running a business from scratch isn’t without its challenges. Especially in a business that deals with fine art, it can be hard to find a scalable niche. For Silaii, it is a matter of creating organisation in a largely unorganised market. Even places like Mahabalipuram, which are revered for its one-of-kind pieces and lively ecosystem of creativity, are stumped with this challenge.

Arun recognised this. Hence, Silaii today consists of a small group of individuals working full-time to make all of its pieces. Sometimes, he finds himself wearing multiple hats on a daily basis.

Then there is the matter of finding sculpturers themselves. As Arun puts it, students from art colleges do not prefer to work for a company like Silaii but for more advanced spaces like IT, visual effects (VFX), and animation.

Thus, when the business runs hot, Arun turns to hire freelancers on a short-term basis to make up for the workload.

On the brink of change

Now, Silaii is building a second unit in Tambaram, Chennai, where it plans to automatise 75% of its work. While it has an experience centre in Palikaranai, also in the works is plans to open an outlet in Chennai, Coimbatore, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Besides this, it is also looking towards expanding its retail presence across the country. For now, Silaii products are available in eight stores in Chennai like Higgnbothams, Odyssey, and Starmarks, to name a few. In order to make its offerings unique, Arun also plans to collaborate with other artists.

It has begun putting a foot forward in this direction. Currently, it has a life-size sculpture of Kangayam Kaalai — a variety of bulls found in Tamil Nadu. This piece was an independent piece of Sundar Pradeesh, an artist and sculptor who works with Silaii.

Arun is confident that he can make sculpture a mainstream market. After being the partner for the International Chess Olympiad, where the company was responsible for sculpting the magnificent Mahabalipuram Shore temple, it received numerous requests from patrons to do important souvenirs representing India and the world.

This led Silaii to the steps of the Tamil Nadu government, where it was required to sculpt the official mascot of the 44th FIDE Chess Olympiad, Thambi, where a one-foot sculpture made by the company was presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“My main goal is to build a business using collectibles. We want every household to have a sculpture, and we want to be that business who takes these sculptures to their homes,” says Arun.