REALITY CHECK: WHERE'S THE MARKET FOR DESIGN WEAR?
Sourish Bhattacharyya (HT City)

Each day at this Lakmé India Fashion Week opened with a reality check, and Monday morning wasn’t any different. The day’s dose was provided by Darlie Koshy, Director, National Institute of Design, who rustled up a wealth of data to show that clothing and footwear accounted for a measly 4.9 per cent of the Rs 1,340,962 crore that consumers spent in the year 2000-01. That translates into Rs 43,105 crore, but of this, branded apparel (namely, the Park Avenues and the Allen Sollys) notched up a minuscule Rs 9,004 crore. Now, that should tell you where the fashion design cottage industry figures with its stated turnover of Rs 180 crore.

The fashion business, it’s quite clear, caters to a microscopic minority, which explains why our designers are so poor with figures. Actually, they cater to a potential market of just 0.19 per cent of the population that accounts for 14 per cent of the national spend on clothing, 44 per cent of branded wear use, 75 per cent of designer labels and 15 per cent of purchases of foreign brands. In other words, there’s a gargantuan market out there that doesn’t have any reason to even bother about the Fashion Week.

B. S. Nagesh, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Shoppers Stop, amplified Koshy’s figures with the experience of Shoppers Stop, where designer labels account for 0.5 per cent of the retail chain’s Rs 284-crore turnover. “Our most valued customer does not spend more than Rs 40,000 on clothes in a year,” averred Nagesh, whose stores draw 25,000 customers daily, resulting in 10,000 cash memos. “The average customer, in fact, spends all of Rs 4,500.” The message couldn’t have been clearer: Our designers should descend from their pedestal and work for the mass market, which is still largely untapped by even branded apparel, let alone designer wear.

If this sounded like gloom and doom, a positive note was struck by Fazle Naqvi, Director (Marketing & Merchandising), Indus League, the makers of Indigo Nation. For the Indian consumer, Naqvi argued, looking good had become very important – they’re far more ready to take the risk of trying out something new.

“As a result, the design dimension is no longer an optional part of marketing. Designers must create consumer needs with their offerings,” Naqvi said. He cited the instances of Speedo, which has made fashion merchandise fashionable for beach-goers, or of Adidas taking the apparel route to emerge out of the turmoil that had wracked it about ten years back, or of Indigo Nation introducing lounge wear in the country with its Chevron shirts, “which are a huge rage in Europe”.

When Naqvi talked about design innovations, he didn’t mean an embroidery here or an embellishment there, but of revolutionary features like soil release, a Japanese invention, that lets a white shirt stay white, or thermal clothing that keeps you cool in summer and warm in winter.

But then, Koshy brought the discussion back to terra firma with more figures. In Korea, 30,000 design students graduate each year. In China, 400 universities and institutes offer design courses. In India, on the other hand, we have 24,000 designers (not merely fashion designers), compared to seven million engineers and technologists. “We haven’t put design on any pedestal to allow it to make a mark,” Koshy commented, and then he went on to offer this piece of advice to the fashion community: “If you want to make money, you must be in the business of making design innovations because you are as good as your last collection. If you don’t produce a blockbuster each season, you will be out of the business.” Sadly, there was only one designer in the audience.