A small stationery and gifting brand in Bengaluru, running on a commerce platform we built ourselves.
Why we started
Founded in Bengaluru, 2026
Handouts sells stationery, accessories, plush, collectables, personalisation, apparel, cute lifestyle products, household bits and birthday & return gifts — the kind of small, well-made things that make an ordinary day a little better. We pick every product ourselves, photograph it ourselves, and pack every order by hand from Bengaluru.
The person behind it
Who runs Handouts
Deepika B N
Founder
Deepika founded Handouts in Bengaluru in 2026 and runs it as a registered proprietorship — choosing every product, shooting the photography, and packing the orders. She also drives how the shop itself is built: rather than renting a hosted storefront, Handouts runs on its own commerce platform, so the ordering, delivery estimates and order tracking can work the way customers here actually need them to.
Handouts does not run on an off-the-shelf store. The storefront, the ordering system, the delivery estimates and the order tracking are all ours, and we run them the way a software team would.
01
Our own storefront and API
The shop is not a hosted template. It is a Next.js storefront and a Django REST API that we build and run ourselves, on Google Cloud Run in Mumbai, with PostgreSQL behind it and product photography served from Cloud Storage.
02
A staging copy of the whole shop
Every change is deployed to a complete second copy of the site first — same code, same database schema, separate data — and checked there before it reaches a customer. Most small shops do not have this; it is why the live site rarely breaks.
03
Sign in with a code, not a password
You log in with a one-time code sent to your phone. There is no password to remember, forget or have leaked, and the code is verified by us rather than a third-party widget.
04
Real delivery dates, not a generic promise
Enter a pincode and the product page asks our courier what transit time it actually quotes for that address, instead of showing everyone the same "3–6 days". Orders are tracked end to end and updates reach you on WhatsApp.
The boring but important bit
Registered business details
Handouts Life Style is the trading name of a sole proprietorship registered as Bhenu Narasimhan Deepika, Bengaluru.
