A perfect fit

SPOTLIGHT

Prachi Patodia was not into garments. But a stint at Brooks Brothers changed all that.

"One of my dreams is to run a marathon," says Prachi Patodia, director of the Rs 25-crore garment manufacturing and fabric processing company, Perfect Knitters.

It sure will be a marathon for the 26-year old who is eyeing a turnover of Rs 300-crore in the next five years, for Perfect Knitters and the recently launched Imperial Garments.

"Garments are not something that always interested me. After graduating from the Wharton School, I worked with Brooks Brothers in the US for about a year," Patodia says.

Today, US is her biggest market for high-end knitted garments. "More than 50 per cent of our revenues come from the US, followed by 25 per cent from Europe," she says.

On the domestic front, Perfect Knitters has not really found a viable footing and the contribution of domestic revenues to the company's bottom line is less than 10 per cent.

"But we are betting big on the Indian market and expect the share to go up to 50 per cent in the next few years," Patodia says, brushing aside apprehensions about the absence of a market for their T-shirts, office wear and weekend wear in the country.

Patodia is now on an expansion binge. She has set up a new unit under the aegis of Imperial Garments, with a capacity to manufacture 40 lakh pieces a year.

The expansion cost the company Rs 25 crore but as Patodia puts it, "finance has never really been a problem for the GTN Group (of which Perfect Knitters and Imperial Garments are associate companies)."

One would consider business a cakewalk for Patodia given her antecedents. She, however, begs to differ: "There was a lot of groundwork that we had to do to convince the buyers of our potential."

Patodia, however, has no regrets about coming back to India. In the meantime, her tryst with the US continues. Patodia was among the selected entrepreneurs invited to meet US President, George Bush, at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, recently. Ask her what fuelled her selection and she smiles, "I guess that remains a mystery even for me."