Brunch with BS: How Viney Singh plans to keep Fabindia's legacy going

Inside the Fabindia Experience Centre in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, a café, an interior design studio, retail space and a play centre for kids come together like pieces of a puzzle. I am reminded of a massive Muji store in Plaza Singapura, Singapore. The Japanese brand has a sprawling space that houses various categories of products, a nutrition-centric café and a design studio. IKEA’s meatballs at the eatery inside its stores are almost legendary.

Fabindia launched its first experience centre in 2017 in Vasant Kunj — today it has 10 and plans to take this number up to 30 by 2020 — just a year after Viney Singh joined the company as managing director. After 19 years in Unilever, a stint at Reliance Infocomm and 10 years with the Landmark Group, the switch to a crafts-centric company like Fabindia seems almost out of character. “There’s been a huge learning curve, especially when it comes to learning about Indian crafts, weaves and the products that we sell,” he says.

When John Bissell set up Fabindia in 1960, he worked with craftspeople with a certain aesthetic in mind, one that has stayed with Fabindia even as it goes through different seasons of fashion. The block-printed kurtas, its indigo range, the chikankari saris and even its solid cotton shirts all sport a design unity. Singh is quick to add that his design sensibilities were always aligned with Fabindia, even when he was just a customer and not heading its business. “It’s been a process of tremendous appreciation of what has gone into building this business and the product categories, especially the work that has gone into creating this brand over the past 60 years,” he says. 

And in nearly three years, Singh has acquired a remarkable knowledge of Indian weaves and textile traditions that would make any handloom enthusiast envious — I certainly am. He explains that the Nehru jacket he is wearing features a coarse weave from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh. His shirt has an abstract block-print design. “Personally, I am a huge fan of ajrakh and ikkat,” he says. His wife, Ruma Singh, a wine writer and journalist, has played a significant role in developing the Singhs’ yen for food, wine and travel. As has the fact that Singh’s father was a tea entrepreneur, working with plantations in Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. “Though my family traces its roots to a small district near Jodhpur in Rajasthan, I have lived in 10 different states in India,” says Singh. College took him to Chennai (Loyola College) and then to Jamshedpur (XLRI). He shuttles between his home in Delhi and Bengaluru, when he’s not travelling to Fabindia’s craft clusters learning about its business at the grassroots.

We pause to place our order at the Fabcafe inside the experience centre. It is almost noon, so we settle for a light brunch. Being a weekend, the space is buzzing with diners, and the boisterous laughter from a table nearby often overpowers Singh’s mellow voice. He settles for a tri-grain papdi chaat medley, a healthier alternative to Delhi’s popular street delicacy, and I opt for the ajwain croissant breakfast sandwich that has eggs, chicken and sun-dried tomatoes. Fabcafe calls itself an “inspired Indian bistro”, with an Indian fusion menu that is made from organic produce. It almost feels like a food version of Fabindia’s retail products.

Between mouthfuls of the papdi chaat, Singh talks about the other brands in the market. He believes that it is just a question of widening the basket, offering more to the consumer to choose from. “I think this growth is essential to build the ecosystem,” he says. 

That may be true, but a huge Fabindia fan base has also lately been disappointed with the prohibitively priced apparel at the store. A tiny embroidery detail on the neck or the hemline often doubles the price of a simple cotton kurta. Even the home décor section that has been a great one-stop-shop for gifts now faces competition from cheaper brands offering similar aesthetic. Since Fabindia is a favourite with expats and foreign tourists, these prices seemed justified for that audience. Today, designers and boutique brands are riding the sustainability and handloom wave and offering products only at a small premium over Fabindia’s range. For a customer willing to pay that price, it would only make sense to buy something more unique than Fabindia’s mass-produced designs.

But since the introduction of the goods and services tax, Fabindia’s products have seen some amount of price correction. Singh says that this is also because the volume of products with a lower price point has gone up in the apparel category. The original Left-liberal buyer could well be back at Fabindia. As would the middle-income buyer looking for a slightly blingy apparel range for occasion wear. This is also why Fabel, Fabindia’s brand for fusion Western wear, was amalgamated into the main apparel category in this month. Nearly 75 per cent of the brand's business comes from the apparel segment. 

A larger question about livelihoods and community development haunts the handloom sector in India. A majority of young weavers don’t want to take their family’s tradition forward and opt for better paying jobs in the cities instead. Fabindia is trying to keep craft traditions alive through design support, Singh says. “We try to strengthen our relationship with the craftspeople by offering them design support. This makes their designs more contemporary and thus, more marketable,” he explains. That’s a fairly obvious route to take. The Bissell family, though, has considered its crafts suppliers as shareholders and shared a larger chunk of the profits than many big brands are known to have done. Singh sidesteps the details of these profit-sharing arrangements but says that the company works closely to ensure greater female participation in the handicraft process.

Singh also refuses to comment on the case that the Khadi and Village Industries Commission filed against Fabindia first in 2015 and then in 2018 for “illegally” using the khadi trademark. In September 2018, Fabindia gave an undertaking that it would stop using the khadi mark on its products. Fabindia now only uses the All India Artisans and Craftworkers Welfare Association’s craftmark that certifies its products are completely handmade. 

My ajwain croissant is cold now and I struggle with the fork-and-knife. Singh notices this and is quick to ask me if I’d like to order something else. I decide to focus my attention on the cold brew iced coffee. Singh is not one to jump to answers to my questions. He takes his time, sometimes even coming back to something I asked at the beginning of our conversation. “One is trying to see how we can strengthen processes within the business and this is where my own learnings have come in quite useful,” he says. These largely revolve around business processes and now, marketing. Its loyalty programme, the FabFamily, is an effort to go beyond Fabindia’s word-of-mouth marketing route. The rewards can be redeemed on shopping, but also on curated experiences such as forthcoming crafts tours or heritage holidays. This is also to incentivise customers who complain that Fabindia has no sale period, even when designer brands such as Raw Mango and boutiques like Ogaan do. Fabindia seems to also have given in to this, with its website offering a selection of products on discount.

But with a reach wider than almost any handloom and handicraft brand — 293 stores across 105 Indian cities and 14 international stores — Fabindia has a network like none other. And Singh now holds the charge to keep Bissell’s legacy going and expand it without diluting the brand.