Ethnic Fusion

With the major upheavals in the market existing big players are managing themselves. But the small and salad brands will anyway carve a niche for themselves.

Just as the world of textiles is moving to a new era of free trade without quota restrictions and the phasing out of Multi-Fibre Agreement, ready-to-wear garment manufacturers and exporters in India are biting their nails in anxiety. While the Arvind Brands, Gokaldas Exports and L T Karles, sail through smoothly through this period of turmoil, how would a small exporter survive? While every brand worth its name is jostling for space in the heavily competitive domestic market, smaller brands are making their presence felt in a subtle way enabled with smart business acumen.

Recently a Delhi based company; TCNS Clothing launched its collection of ready-to-wear Indian formals. ‘W’ as it is called is now displayed in all large format retail chain stores across the country. Similarly in Bangalore a little known brand called Jole Clothing, it is slowly establishing itself as a ready-to-wear brand for women’s ethnic wear. While the domestic market is still very much into tailored garments and sarees, how would female buyers who constantly worry about size, fit and quality of stitching, respond to ready-to-wear apparel.

Gautam Jain, CEO, Jole Clothing explains the trend in a convincing manner. “Till now Indian women have been wearing tailored outfits, however as more and more women get into professional life, they are bound to pick ready-to-wear garments due to convenience. Moreover a branded garment can give a range of choices in size, fit, quality of stitching, colour and design. Lot of planning goes into understanding the product and the seasons trend, we also have a full fledged design team.”

Ethnic Differentiator

As the market is evolving, there is a lot of noise about Indian ethnic wear due to the entry of bigger brands. Would there be any differentiation among various players… Gautam says, “For instance ‘W’ has come out with a work wear which is a mix & match collection, where buyers can select a Salwar, Kurta and Dupatta separately. Our garments come in both mix & match and standard set packs, where the buyer gets choice to either choose a single set or a mix. We also change designs as per the fashion trends.” Surely Indian dresses are more complicated than a plain western suit or a skirt!

Another USP that makes Jole stand out in a crowded shop is to have a fusion of western and Indian ethnic concepts. Focussed on both trendy teenagers and middle aged women who would like to experiment, it has dresses with heavy embroidery and salwars with spaghetti straps. Each piece is intricately designed with lot of manual embroidering work in a difficult and tedious process. But then isn’t that a major hindrance in scaling up the operations… Yes, that’s the reason Jole is focussing only on one large buyer, Lifestyle stores, since scaling up will affect quality in a manual labour oriented work. Though there are machines for embroidery, since the garments are customised pieces in limited numbers, a worker can only do one piece a day.

 
Scalability factor

Every garment manufacturer has thought about ethnic wear, but this one hindrance has kept them away. Moreover sourcing a wide range of fabric material and accessories needed for ethnic wear is another headache. Jole has strategically balanced both its domestic sales of ethnic wear and exports of western wear to optimally use the large number of labourers. In its early days, it was sold in many other retail chains like Globus and Pyramid, but due to limits of scale, focussing to the needs of one large retail chain itself is a daunting task. Since Lifestyle is expanding to 22 stores in next three years, Jole can gradually expand its operations in accordance with that.

But can it think about being an independent label in ethnic ready-to-wear segment…

“Being an independent label needs an enormous effort involving a huge marketing spend and an entire new thought process compared to being a private label. Everyone would aspire to be an independent label, but you can’t achieve that easily. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t be secure in the market being a private label.

Since we have been in the fabric trading business for a long time, we have seen it evolve. Today, if we don’t give quality with the right pricing, we won’t survive. To accomplish that we need to have an integrated process with quality standards,” opines Gautam.

If businessmen like Gautam with traditional expertise in the textile industry, speak with such apprehensions, it only indicates the level of competitiveness Indian market will experience in the near future. The onslaught of foreign brands in domestic markets, coupled with removal of quota restrictions, has brought out everyone to a level playing battlefield. We await an exciting and turmoil ridden scene ahead.