Chennai traditionally has not been a hub for textiles, however being a Metro city and the central location for surrounding textile hubs like Karur, Coimbatore, Salem, Tirupur, Madurai and Erode, many home furnishing companies are operating from the capital of Tamil Nadu in South India. Team Apparel Online on their recent visit to Chennai met up with a few players who are having their major manufacturing base in Karur, producing a wide variety of product categories in home textiles, with curtains occupying the maximum percentage in their product basket. Catering primarily to European and Scandinavian countries, these companies are not just producing basic commodities but doing a lot of surface ornamentation.
About 15 years back there were around 7,40,000 handlooms in India out of which four lakh looms were in Tamil Nadu alone with Karur accounting for 70,000 handlooms, equivalent to total looms in the State of Andhra Pradesh. Today Karur has only 10,000 handlooms, spread over several households, but that does not mean that the hub switched over to some other business, in fact the hub has become more updated with powerlooms and autolooms ruling the industry.
Based on the strength, many Chennai players either have their manufacturing setup in Karur or are outsourcing production from the town. “If we manufacture products in Karur it’s cheaper as every household has 2-3 looms, and ladies of the house do the weaving. If I setup a factory I’ll have to employ so many people, pay them salaries besides the infrastructure cost. But presently I just need to give yarns and get it weaved, hence my expense is only on labour charges. We started with handloom but market is changing and to keep up to the pricing, we have shifted to powerloom and autoloom. Now handloom is high-end,” says Ra. Rajendiran, Managing Director, Trident Home Furnishings (P) Ltd.
Wooltop Designs, a subsidiary of A.I Enterprises, has one unit in Chennai and one in Karur. While talking about Chennai H.E. Abdul Azeez, CMD of the company shares that Chennai doesn’t have skilled labour, while Karur has both skilled workforce and infrastructure for textile weaving; it’s easier logistically as well. “Karur is between Erode and Trichy; it takes about eight-and-a-half hours by train from Chennai. Also since Karur has acquired the expertise in heavy fabric it is the perfect place to source for home furnishings. In contrast, Salem and Erode are making finer counts which are used for garments. What Karur does, Panipat cannot do. In Karur every street has about 10 to 15 exporters, who are clued into the international requirements,” states Azeez.
Over the time, Karur has developed into the biggest manufacturing centre for home furnishings in the south as it makes coarser counts. S. Selladurai, Partner, Shyamali Export, too has a unit in Karur with 120 machines and one in Chennai with around 50 machines. He says, “Karur is the base for cotton textiles and we produce kitchen textiles, table linen, curtains, cushions… anything made out of 100% cotton.” However, with recession, the traditional hub is facing problems and according to the majority of home furnishing players, there is a decline in buying leading to almost 30% companies closing down during the past two years. The companies which are doing high-end products are however reasonably positioned as buying in that segment has not stopped. “In the US, earlier people used to use and throw the place mats but now they wash and reuse it. We have seen that while the US has slowed down, buying from Europe is still doing well,” shares Prashant Sankaran, Vice-President, Business Development, Visma International.
Wooltop Design, standing at a turnover of over Rs. 25 crore was initially started by Nirmal Mirza (now owner of Nirmal Mirza Designs) in 1986. However in 2000, she went bankrupt, so AIE took over the company. “We are mainly catering to the European market, we are also exporting some volumes to the US and a little to the Middle East, mostly to the high-end market. Seeing the market conditions we are now shifting to medium and low segment as well because the top end buyers are asking for lower FOBs, which is getting difficult for us to manage,” avers Azeez.
Most of the companies are trying to manage their costing by playing with different blends and constructions. “We play a lot with the construction of the fabric. When the cotton yarn prices went up we did a lot of R&D, playing with different qualities to meet our buyer’s price points and designs as well. If we were earlier doing thicker counts then we started working on thinner counts,” corroborates Selladurai.
Shyamali Export, doing a turnover of Rs. 30 crore, has around 120 machines in their Karur plant and around 50 machines in the Chennai factory. The company is now going for expansion with another factory of about 35,000 sq. feet area coming up in Chennai. Shyamali Export, for which curtain is the biggest product category, is making its own fabrics by outsourcing looms in Karur. “We are stitching within our premises, earlier we used to outsource stitching also but we faced a lot of problems in quality. We are very strong in print designs; we have one designer in Sweden and a few in Chennai,” adds Selladurai who prefers to have bigger products as it increases the volumes and in turn the turnover.
With uncertainty in the global market and booming domestic market, the home furnishing companies in Chennai have also ventured into retailing by launching their own brands. Visma International, Trident Home Furnishing, Zen Linen International (a subsidiary of Indokem Overseas Ltd. to mention a few already have a presence in the domestic market. Visma International launched its own brand Mavis Home about four years back. According to Prashant, from 2005 to 2009, Visma was facing problems due to sluggish demand in the international market and that was the time he and his father thought of getting into retail. “We were doing just ok business with our existing clients but we really didn’t build any new business. It took us a while to understand the domestic market requirement as our product orientation was more towards export market. In 2008 we started an experimental store in Chennai now we are more or less settled and understand what the market requires. We are looking at increasing our distribution network,” says Prashant who is catering to Europe and Scandinavian countries. “We do a little bit of South America; in Chile we do a lot of business. We have been in business with Japan in a big way in the past however off late the Japanese market has not been so good for our kind of products,” he adds.
[bleft]Based on the strength, many Chennai players either have their manufacturing setup in Karur or are outsourcing production from the town. Karur is cheaper as every household has 2-3 looms[/bleft]
Trident too has its brand called Vickys which is getting good response from the market. Established in 1994, the company is doing a turnover of Rs. 20 crore. “I am planning to go for own retail stores and sell through other retailers as well. I am also putting up a new factory in Tanjore where I am installing some autolooms. Six months back we added 150 sewing machines. I am also looking at catering to institutional market like hotel etc.,” shares Rajendran, who in exports is doing 100% cotton based furnishings majorly to the European market. The company has also started producing linen products. “Technically we are not sound to produce 100% linen fabric so we went to Bhagalpur to do the same. We are the first company to introduce Karur with cotton-linen mixing. Now lots of things are being made in Karur; we are trying 100% linen also, though there are technical issues related to linen weaving. In another 5-6 months we’ll be able to overcome these issues,” adds Rajendran.
Distinct from the other players, Zen Linen which is producing fill products like comforters and pillow for the export market has also recently ventured into retails business. “Six months back we launched our own brand Zenia; we are doing pillows and slim mats for yoga, etc. We are selling through around 90 small stores. We are going for increasing our product bouquet so that we can offer bigger volumes. We are also looking at making satellite factories in cities where we want to sell our products like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc. as transportation of these products is very expensive,” shares Swadeep Patnaik, CEO, Zen Linen International & Classic Linens International.
Zen & Classic are group companies of Loomtex and Indokem Overseas owned by Bharat Mohindra. The company is producing high-fashion bedding at its unit in Chennai’s SEZ. “We make high-fashion beddings that are very design-oriented; we have designers in France, who design beddings for us. We get very good demand for our prints; some US customers are in pipeline. Besides comforters, we are trying to sell white inners of duvets. In these products we have stiff competition from China and East European countries like Estonia for the European markets,” remarks Swadeep.
Zen Linen also does a lot of sleeping pillows – the inners white. “We do thread counts (tc) of 210 till 300 tc, of which the shells are made. 300 tc is very fine thread count and at times we also go up to even 800 tc,” informs Swadeep. The company is now looking at producing body pillows and baby pillows. The company has nine automatic plants for pillow manufacturing and a completely automated plant for making wadding quilts (patchwork). The company, with a current turnover of Rs. 65 crore, is growing by 30% YOY and is looking at touching Rs. 100 crore by next FY.
