T R Vivek: Tailor-made for the job

BACKSTAGE

's shoes is tough.

A first look at the 53-year-old executive director of Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), the apex body of the fledgling, yet high-decibel industry that organises the annual glamour jamboree Lakme India Fashion Week (LIFW), suggests little connection between the fashion frat and its captain Kaul.

Clad in a powder-blue shirt and grey trousers, and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, Kaul shows no signs of his proximity to fashion and could pass off for an unostentatious CEO, or an unflappable professor constantly monitoring his wards.

He makes sure he's seated in the front row at almost all the 37 fashion shows during the week, shuttling between press conferences and the buyer meetings he is facilitating for designers.

Over the last two years, the FDCI under Kaul has managed to make the LIFW a platform for serious business opportunities, rather than the week-long, marathon page-three party it earlier resembled.

This year, according to Kaul, the LIFW is at least 25 to 30 per cent bigger in scale. It is estimated that it cost nearly Rs 4 crore to organise the show.

In Mumbai last year, sourcing deals worth Rs 25 crore were signed, and by the time the curtains come down in Delhi, Kaul expects the figure to nudge up to Rs 40 crore.

"It is now much more than a mere showcasing of design talent in the country. The aim is to develop business opportunities for all stakeholders," he says. He has pulled off a coup of sorts by getting marquee fashion retailers and potential buyers like Saks Fifth Avenue of New York and Browns, London, to visit the LIFW.

To increase the international visibility of the LIFW, Kaul has convinced Colin McDowell, considered the most influential fashion critic in Europe, to have a dekko at the event. Leading designers like Manish Arora and Raghavendra Rathore readily acknowledge the FDCI's efforts at creating awareness of Indian fashion at a global level.

An important decision, which conveyed that the LIFW means business, was advancing the event to April from June to integrate it with the global summer-buying calendar.

Two years ago, when Kaul took over the reins at the FDCI, his first priority was to corporatise the fragmented fashion industry.

"Typically, the high fashion business can work only in joint ventures between designers and corporate houses. It's not the designer's job to go out and market his collections. He is, after all, just a creative person. It is the business houses that can produce a good design on a large scale and invest in advertising and selling it," he explains.

Mind you, Kaul has the right credentials to talk of such an ideal marriage between the two sides. As an executive director at Raymond, he was instrumental in the company's foray into women's designerwear through retail chain Be:. Be: was the first attempt by a company at tying up with leading designers and building a nation-wide chain of stores to capture their individual brand equity.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Kaul also had an eight-year stint in Canada, working for leading apparel retail chains there.

Kaul has seen all the five editions of the LIFW "" first as a buyer, with Benetton and Be:, and now as the show's proprietor.

"There has been a marked difference between now and the first couple of years. Earlier it was just the designers showing off their creative abilities. Now the designs and clothes, besides being trendy, are more in tune with the market," he says.

Kaul admits that convincing designers about this was difficult in the initial days. The FDCI holds several workshops for designers, giving them valuable inputs on how to improve the marketability of their creations.

Set up in 1998, the FDCI was the brainchild of the then Secretary of Textiles Shyamal Ghosh; it now has nearly 90 designer members and a dozen corporate bodies on board and by 2010, it hopes to have grown the industry to Rs 1,000 crore from the current Rs 200 crore. Clearly, Kaul is hoping to make the FDCI do for the Indian fashion industry what Nasscom has done for infotech.