Walk into high-fashion clothing chain Bijenkorf’s outlet in Krasnapolski Square in Amsterdam’s main shopping district and tick off the shirt brands on display. Armani, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Zodiac,… Zodiac? Doesn’t quite gel here, does it? Bijenkorf does not think so. You will find Mumbai-based Zodiac Clothing Company’s branded shirts jostling global brands for space even in its outlets in Holland’s other big cities, Rotterdam and The Hague. In the UK, 130-odd Ciro Citterio classic menswear retail stores have placed Zodiac shirts next to Polestar shirts made by the UK-based Thomas Pink, considered the world’s best shirt makers.

Zodiac is a high-end brand in India, but it sells only through exclusive stores in five-star hotels. Hence, you may often fail to include it among India’s top brands. If Zodiac stands out as the only Indian brand in the fashionable stores abroad, that’s because the Rs 124-crore group is unique among India’s 20,000-odd garment exporters. Yes, most of the world’s best brands – GAP, Tommy Hilfiger, or Ralph Lauren – are made by Indian firms like the Delhi-based, Rs-450 crore Orientcraft or the Mumbai-based, Rs 100-crore The Shirt Company. Yet, only Zodiac sells shirts under its own label abroad. Managing director Salman Noorani says: “We had just one mission – to make the best shirts in the world. The rest is just a consequence.” Says India’s largest domestic apparel maker Raymond’s president Nabankur Gupta: “Zodiac has done a good job.”

And what a good job that is. Last year, Zodiac sold shirts worth Rs 21 crore in the UK and the Netherlands. That is 17% of its total sales and a third of its exports. Zodiac shirts retail at 50 euros in Europe, nearly twice the domestic cost, and are more expensive than other private labels, which retail at 40 euros (higher-end brands like Hugo Boss and Armani sell at 60-plus euros). So, if volumes go up, the upside is huge. Noorani knows that. He is investing a “substantial” amount in building a 5,000 sq ft design centre in his office in central Mumbai. His next target: the German and the US markets.

Zodiac’s brand sales overseas may be tiny compared to India’s $5-billion garment exports. Yet it is significant. So far, Indian firms worked on a cost-plus basis with foreign retailers taking the bulk of the margins. Says Noorani: “In the long run, we will get more money for our hard work and the efficiencies we create.”

In reality, Zodiac is not too different from other Indian exporters. Like the Bangalore-based Goculdas images, it makes shirts in its fully-automated factory in Bangalore. It sources fabric from the same Indian mills that other top exporters buy from. It employs 3,500 workers, as much as any exporter of its size. Much of its income comes from making and exporting shirts for private labels abroad. So what makes Zodiac special?

Noorani shows you a series of cards with swatches of fabric stuck on them. These are designs and weaves that Zodiac designers have specially created for different markets. Based on these, Zodiac will make collections for different seasons – like the Florentine collection for summer. And this is where it begins to differ from others. Traditionally, when a GAP or a Wal-Mart buys from India, it supplies the exporter with a set of designs. The exporter translates the designs into shirts with little value addition.

Zodiac’s model changes that. When Noorani started selling in Europe in 1996, he set up design offices in the UK and Germany. These offices track international fashion trends and create shirt designs for every season. These are then fabricated into shirts and sent to Europe. The process does not end there. Designers in India modify those designs to create newer lines, which are then hawked to buyers who order shirts for their own brands. A few days ago, Dubai-based retailer Splash chose half-a-dozen designs based on the Florentine collection. As a result, Zodiac shirts for other labels export at 15-20 euros compared to 6-10 euros that other exporters make. Says Delhi-based textile consultant Creatnet Services’ Devangshu Dutta: “Design is the simplest way that Indian companies can move up the value chain.”

It is not that other Indian exporters don’t design. Mumbai-based Go-Go International’s director Rajiv Goenka buys garments from malls and exclusive showrooms in Paris and Germany, restyles them and shows them to foreign buyers. But this is only a way to get more business; Goenka gets no premium for his labour. Says Dutta: “Buyers are quick to realise these designs are not original and, hence, won’t pay anything extra.”

Zodiac’s design process is more intensive. A typical stylesheet that its international designers create contains the type of fabric, the weaves and the colours in vogue, and the like. Textile engineers in Mumbai weave a sample of that fabric style in their in-house unit and send it to the international designers for approval. Once approved, the fabric is produced at looms it has hired in three leading mills in India. The result: in three months, Zodiac has unique designs to offer to its foreign customers, way ahead of other Indian exporters.

Other Indian firms, too, are waking up to the opportunity. Last year, Raymond, which sells woollen fabric in Europe and the Middle East, bought a suit-making factory in Portugal along with its design team. Today, it sells 300-400 Parx suits a day in Spain and Portugal. Arvind sells its Arrow shirts in the Middle East, while Birla group company Indian Rayon has enlisted the help of European designers to dress up its shirts.

But it will not be easy. Zodiac cannot build its brand quickly. And Noorani does not want to sell his clubwear brand Zod! abroad yet even though a German chain has shown interest in it. That’s because reputed retailers do not stock single-product ranges. Hugo Boss sells perfumes, shirts, ties and wallets. Flagship Zodiac has built such a product line over the years; one-year-old Zod! is still to do so. Even if it wants to have a new product line, it will have to invest big money. For shirts, Zodiac invested Rs 20 crore. And a few months back, it bought Niryat Sam’s factory for Rs 25 crore as it wants to make trousers. In an earlier interview with BW, chairman M.Y. Noorani said: “In the shirting business, the more number of years you are in the business, the more respectable you become. Building a premium brand is really a long haul.”

Can Zodiac withstand that?

You can just about stand straight in the mezzanine floor office that Krishna Mehta (right) operates from. The 500-sq ft space inside Zeba’s showroom in Worli, Mumbai, also houses 22 other designers, a few computers, design books and loads of clothes. The ambience is chaos, exactly opposite to the order and sophistication Zeba creates in the lobbies of five-star hotels, companies and homes in India and abroad through its home textile designs.

What is Zeba? Simply, India’s leading home textile firm. Among its achievements, Zeba made a 17,000-sq ft carpet for a convention centre in Hyderabad. The Limca Books of Records considers it the world’s largest hand-tufted carpet.

Earlier, in Messe Frankfurt’s Heimtextil fair in Germany, Zeba was the only Indian home textile firm invited to the select ‘Trends Hall’. This year, it plans to open its own stores in Belgium, Morocco and Germany in addition to existing ones in the UK and Spain. All in the name of design.

Till three years ago, Zeba was like any other exporter. It sold to big stores across the world, but produced only what buyers wanted – till Krishna Mehta came on the scene, after a stint in New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Now 30% of Zeba’s Rs 60-crore revenues come from own-brand sales in India and abroad. Krishna expects the firm to eventually sell more of the Zeba brand than under the brands of other, big foreign buyers.

Krishna does not think that designing for global markets is hard. He draws ideas from the Internet, catalogues, while travelling and “any other source”. He has designers from the National Institute of Design, the National Institute of Fashion Technology and institutes in Mumbai. Krishna says: “The most important aspect of designing is the final presentation to customers. That’s where most Indians fail.”

Besides design, detailed photo shoots of the product and cataloguing, too, has paid good dividends. Last year, when exports of other companies fell, Zeba’s customers increased orders by 25%. This year, while volumes from old UK buyers have not increase a lot, many new stores have signed on. Says Zeba director Rajan Mehta (left): ” Design has changed the way we do business. We are now in control. ”

This article is from the 12 May,2003 issue of Businessworld.

Priyanka Pani, The Hindu Businessline

Mumbai, May 2, 2013

They are all over the place – on a hoarding, on the telly, on the radio, in the newspaper – ads caustically caricaturing South Indians, harping on their idiosyncrasies, mocking their mannerisms, their language, their accent.

‘Betterrr safe thaaaan saari’ goes the television campaign by travel portal GoIbibo, which has been criticised as being in “very bad taste” and “irritating” by many consumers for obvious reasons.

A huge chunk of advertisements these days playing out on the idiot box are portraying South Indian stereotypes – they do not know about Holi, all nurses hail from Kerala, or even that people from the South have a typical accent.

The Idea commercial featuring a South Indian dad running away from kids playing Holi is a case in point as is Dhoni’s missing pillow in the Gulf Oil advert. Don’t look now, but there is a Rajnikanth lookalike in the Finolex commercial as well as the You Telecom one, and Kareena Kapoor’s ‘Romba Nalla’ selling point for Mahindra Duro.

A campaign by mosquito repellent Hit has a nurse, with a distinct South Indian twang. Again, this is supposed to appeal to the mindset that all nurses are from the South and will have a heavy accent, says Kiran Khalap, co-founder of creative agency Cholorphyll.

Of late, every third advertisement that we see on television has some South Indian connect or element attached to it. So, are marketers trying to engage the so called ‘conservative’ South Indians?

Subhobroto Chakroborty, Business Head, Genesis Advertising, says, “Breaking the clutter in the Southern market is difficult. Hence, creative agencies are coming out with new ideas and different marketing strategies to woo the Southerners.”

Other advertising experts say advertising in India has suddenly discovered the South as the consumption story is picking up there. “Even though southern States contribute about 56 per cent to the Indian GDP, they were not known as spenders but huge savers. This phenomenon is changing,” says brand strategist Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.

Earlier, gold, utensils or financial products were the high-priority areas for the Southerner, who chose not to spend much on comfort, says Bijoor. But things have changed of late. The priorities are changing and so is the buying pattern, he adds.

While Virat Kohli is endorsing Nestle’s Munch South style, playing B. K. Vaali, a Tamil look-alike of his who manages to get a shot at an entry into the local cricket team just by crunching on a Munch bar and distracting the opposite team, Chennai Super Kings’ captain M. S. Dhoni is endorsing Gulf Oil.

The list goes on: Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu toppled Bollywood’s ‘Akki’ Akshay Kumar to become the brand ambassador for Thums Up. This year, marketers have entered into a kind of rat race to inject humour into their ads with some quirky southern dialogues thrown in for good measure.

Santosh Desai, CEO of Futurebrands, believes advertisers have woken up to the fact that India is not just in New Delhi-NCR or the metro region alone, and that they need to look at other markets too.

“Media is no more region-specific. The same advertisement is reaching out to a nondescript village in Karnataka and Rajasthan as well as the big metros,” said Desai. When regional food becomes popular in the metros and more and more marriages cross geographical and linguistic barriers, why should ads be left behind, he asks.

PepsiCo’s recent television commercial for 7-Up shows a girl waiting for transport on a hot sunny day, and is suddenly entertained by a Kathakali dancer, who appears to be gyrating to a salsa number.

Khalap believes ad makers are no longer putting a face to any region, but are looking at all consumers. The trend appears to be sweeping across corporates. From chocolate companies to AC manufacturers, banks to financial service companies, and even lubricant makers, companies have jumped on the bandwagon, all rolling southwards.

AC firm Voltas has a Tamil-accented male protagonist to promote its all-weather air conditioner. Competitor Lloyds AC too has decided to take the southern route.

Alpana Parida of DY Works says with people travelling to other States for work or business opportunities, advertisers feel the need to stay connected with consumers in different and unique ways.

Devangshu Dutta, founder of marketing research firm Third Eyesight, adds that creative agencies have always used humour to break the clutter. Hence they come out with extraordinary – which could be senseless – and funny ads that viewers might instantly connect to. For example, the Maruti advertisement featuring a Sikh son and dad (“Petrol khatam hi nahin hondaah”) is still fresh in consumers’ minds and has nothing to do with Punjabis but with the fact that Maruti is sold more in North India, he adds. The southern element in ads can also be attributed in large part to the fact that the consumption story is now being driven by the South Indians and that a large part of South India resides in the North too. This is probably what prompted Havells to launch a campaign for its grinders where the idlis made with its help substitute flowers that decorate the house for festivities.