Across the globe, leading apparel manufacturing countries have a strong brand image. While China is well recognised for its ability to ‘create scale’, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are known for ‘cost’ and ‘quality’.
However, in case of India, such a brand image is missing. Experts across the textile supply chain strongly believe that India can get a strong brand identity of sustainability.
Texcon, a virtual conference organised by Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), explored this issue, wherein experts strongly agreed that sustainability should have a strong brand image for Indian textile and apparel export industry.
Nidhi Dua, Head of India & Sri Lanka Region, Marks & Spencer India insisted that India should push itself for sustainability as a brand identity.
Mark Green, Executive Vice President, PVH Supply was of the opinion that India should focus on transparency and traceability and improve cotton’s quality and branding as well. He shared how US did a good job in this regard, and that Indian Government should also come forward for the same.
Ashish Kumar, CEO, Arvind Advanced Materials, Arvind Envisol and Garmenting shared that along with sustainability, India should also brand its high fashion value garments. He highlighted that a lot is happening on the sustainability front and India needs to highlight the same.
Rajnish Bhatia, CEO, Trident Group, shared the concept of PDCA – Patent, Discover, Content and Availability and added that to make sustainability a ‘Brand India’ image and to grow in overall textile export, it is must that whatever development India is doing, need to secure them.
“Textile industry can face threat from any other industry just like the camera industry faced threat from smartphones. There are many kinds of dryers today to dry one’s body after bath, using which a person doesn’t require a towel. There is the development that by using a specially developed towel, the body gets perfumed and a person doesn’t require a separate perfume,” he said. He further added that as content, India needs strong story telling to create hype about efforts and along with all that we have to make sure the ‘Availability’ as there are challenges across the globe with the supply chain.
Harish Chatterjee, Vice President & Head – Textile Manufacturing, Raymond Ltd. shared how Raymond is growing globally and strongly following the concept of sustainability.
