Fancy footwork

MY FIRST MILLION/DALJIT SINGH

Daljit Singh joined his father's shoe-export business in the early 1970s with a brief to research the domestic market.

But he also saw the opportunity to expand the company's export operations beyond the Soviet Union. Singh's efforts saw TSF (Tej Shoe Factory) make rapid strides in both the domestic and the foreign market.

In the mid-1980s he also took the initiative of importing foreign machinery that would enable the manufacture of complete shoes in India.

Today, a business that was started with just a few lakh rupees has a turnover of Rs 80 crore and is still expanding and innovating.

"My father had his feet firmly in the shoe business long before TSF was launched.

He ran a small shoeshop in Peshawar before Partition and later, when he settled in India, he started trading in shoes. It was when he decided to start production that Tej Shoe Factory was inaugurated. That was in 1962, in Agra.

In the early years, TSF exported shoe uppers to the Soviet Union, since it was our main trading partner in those days.

I should explain that right until the mid-1980s, complete shoes were not exported out of India, since soling material of acceptable quality was not available here.

We only had leather as a soling option. So only uppers were exported from India and the soling was done in the importing country.

In 1970-71, after completing my graduation in B.Com, I became actively involved with the business. Around this time, we were exploring opportunities in the domestic market, and my initial role was to study the Indian market and determine customer preferences here.

But since exports were our core business, I also decided to look at options for countries other than the Soviet Union.

In 1975 we struck a deal with a franchisee in Denmark and this is where we really took off as a company.

Starting 1976, our company grew by around 100 per cent annually, for the next few years. Gradually, we began exporting to other countries such as Norway, Sweden and Germany. Today, of course, we have a presence practically all over the world.

The next major milestone for us was in 1984, when we imported a soling machine from Germany that allowed us to manufacture and export complete shoes instead of just uppers.

This also made us the first shoe company in the country to make PU soles with the "direct injection" technology. It was a revolution of sorts in the shoe-export business in this country.

Today we have five units in all "" four in Agra and one in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan "" all well-equipped with sophisticated machinery. We employ around 2,500 people directly, and many others on a contractual basis.

Our turnover is around Rs 80 crore today, to which exports still contribute around 90 per cent. We still see exports as our area of expertise. While domestic demand has gradually been increasing, we are still way behind the west.

In the US, for instance, four pairs of shoes are sold per capita per year. But in India on an average only one in seven persons buys a pair of shoes yearly.

One major opportunity for us is that countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal, which were big shoe-producers, are going into decline because of increasing labour costs.

To get our foot firmly in this door, we must ensure that we can match international production quality. To this end, we have been doing a lot of research into the standards that are expected globally.

We also provide our customers with a range of options: we've recently introduced driving shoes with a curvature especially suited to long and strenuous drives; and we are also providing complete leather shoes in a range of interesting, two-tone colours.

Then there's the San Crispino range, comprising completely handstitched shoes in the Italian style. We are innovating and reinventing ourselves constantly, and the future is very bright for our business. "