Not a Freudian blip

Meet a home design success that looks set to linger well into our future.

Sunil Suresh is certainly not your next door "furniturewala". Take, for instance, his boutique's name: Stanley. Or even better, take his clientele.

It includes corporates like Leela Palace, Windsor Sheraton, Wipro, Dell, Motorola, GE and IBM, besides such celebrities as Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Dilip Chhabria, N R Narayana Murthy, Vijay Mallya and Azim Premji.

Operating in Bangalore, Suresh has frogleapt the competition by striking a partnership with the $2-billion US company LazBoy, which makes the eponymous sofa-cum-bed recliner that has become a conversation starter. Like cranberry juice 10 years ago, it makes eyes sparkle upon the very discovery that you have heard of it.

LazBoy recliners are imported as completely knocked down units, assembled at Stanley's workshop in Bangalore, and delivered at prices ranging from Rs 25,000-50,000 apiece.

"The chairs have a very premium clientele," says Sunil Suresh, "But with the consumer psyche undergoing a change, we expect to sell more such top-of-the-line products in Indian metros."

Above all, Stanley needs to demonstrate that it is not just a fashion blip but a sustainable business with clear growth prospects. This calls for expansion, and for that Suresh has an outlay of Rs 10 crore for the year, which includes money on promotion of Stanley's chairs.

On what would attract people to his showrooms, this is what he has to say: "We give customers personalised service, options to customise the leather furniture, and quality that will be a step above the imported leather furniture from China, Malaysia and Thailand."

To make an advertising pitch in a world full of noise, though, Stanley's proposition would have to be far more clearly focused than that. Perhaps on a single winning attribute.

The determination to win is evident, and that's a good sign. The Rs 60-crore Stanley expects to open two new boutiques in Pune and Ludhiana soon.

"We have six Stanley boutiques in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad, and will take the number to 15 in the next three years," says Suresh, who avoids the malls that so many other lifestyle brands are drawn to.

Brands with genuine sophistication, he believes, prefer standalone retail points. "Stanley boutiques will be large format and built on areas of 8,000-10,000 square feet," he adds.

Apart from that, the entrepreneur plans a swank new plant. "We have invested Rs 2 crore to launch another manufacturing facility in Bangalore that can produce up to 1,000 seaters per month."

As a group, Stanley sells leather upholstery for luxury cars as well, with clients such as General Motors, Honda Siel, Ford, Mitsubishi, Toyota Kirloskar, M&M and Volvo.

"I see the company's turnover breaching the Rs 500 crore mark by 2011 and that means a growth rate of about 75 per cent," says Suresh, sounding a tad overambitious.

So, what next? "Going international, of course," pat comes the reply. "Stanley will be in Dubai, UAE and Singapore in the next 18 months, and later in Europe and the UK too." Much will depend, of course, on the seminal success of the brand's proposition.