NO ROOM FOR DESIGNER EGOS IN THE NEW MARKET
Sourish Bhattacharyya (HT City)

Journalists hate the expression ‘content providers’. Likewise, fragile designer egos tend to get frayed when they’re called vendors, but Aniruddha Deshmukh, Executive Director, Raymond, insists on calling them that. Being the guy who presides over Be:, Deshmukh is changing the rules of the fashion business, and, surprisingly, the design community is more market-savvy than we give it credit for.

In the mass market-driven prêt business, as Deshmukh pointed out on the second day of the Lakme India Fashion Week, there’s no room for egos. Which means designers have to change the way they work. For starters, they must be ready to accept that in the real world, “prices are determined by end consumers,” so they’ve to “work backwards from identified price points to offer the right products at the right prices”.

In the marketplace, says Deshmukh, labels don’t necessarily result in sales, which may come as a real shock to designers, who had got used to dictating prices to a minuscule client base. Here’s how Be: had changed the rules of the fashion business: For each season, the fashion retail chain adapts international forecasts to the needs of its Indian target consumers, constantly tracking the fastest-moving price points as well as constantly tracking colours that are hot and those that aren’t.

In a significant shift departure from the past, when individual designers would adhere to their own production cycles, the Be: management expects the dozen designers associated with it to work a season in advance (“by 2003, we’ll be a couple of seasons in advance,” assures Deshmukh).

It has defined a prêt price band, compiled a quality manual and standardised the size chart (otherwise, designers were following their own sizing rules dictated by individual preferences), and it expects designers to adhere to them.

Finally, the participating designers are expected to make detailed presentations during designated buying weeks – “within a couple of seasons, we have moved away from a situation where we had to base our decisions on sketches, without any samples, without any cost pricing, without any idea of the fabrics or colour options,” says Deshmukh.

Luckily for Be:, or maybe because of it, our design community have become definitely more market-sensitive. Bobby and Manju Grover, who’ve created a completely western look for their prêt line priced at Rs 600 to Rs 9,900 for retailers, point out that outwardly mobile Indians have found out how inexpensive it is to shop at outlet malls in America and Europe, “where you can get an Armani jacket at a 70 per cent discount in January”.

Bobby, in fact, loves to recount how the same line of Bally shoes he’d seen priced at US$200 in Dubai last April, was selling for US$50 at Oxford Street, London, this past January. “That’s our competition, but our designers have yet to get serious about their business,” he says. “They regard expansion as a headache because they’ve got used to working in very comfortable environments.”

Like Bobby, Monisha Bajaj is raring to go prêt, but it’s not often that she gets an order for 500 pieces, as she got from Westside some time back, which brought down her prices dramatically. “Internationally, stores buy quantities and have the spaces to sell volumes, but we don’t have that here,” she says. “Only if buyers start buying quantities, we can go for batch production and bring down our prices.” Well, she’s serious, for she believe that the market for designer clothes is extremely limited, and that competitive pricing is the only way forward.