Comfort furniture

When a BPO company approached Mumbai-based Godrej Furniture and Interior Group to make different sizes of chairs for men and women for its office, its creative team designed customised seats that can be adjusted to suit individual needs with minor adjustments in the existing set of furniture.

Godrej Furniture's Knowledge Centre is known for providing innovative design solutions for office furniture. But now it wants to capture a bigger slice of the Rs 650-crore branded office furniture market by setting up five other Knowledge Centres in Hyderabad, Chennai, Chandigarh, Bangalore and Delhi. The company has earmarked over Rs 1 crore to meet its expansion goals.

Says Anil Mathur, vice president and business head of Godrej Furniture and Interior Group, "We have reached a stage where we wish to display our design capabilities and share the science and aesthetics of design with our institutional clients."

The company had spent Rs 50 lakh to set up its first Knowledge Centre in Mumbai two years ago. Godrej Furniture and Interior Group is a division of Godrej & Boyce.

While these Knowledge Centres won't be walk-in showrooms, it will provide a platform for the designers to interact with corporate executives, architects and designers to create better designs, according to Mathur. Currently Godrej enjoys 50 per cent of the market share in the office furniture segment.

Through its Knowledge Centres, the company also wants to popularise the concept of "touch and feel". Here, the inhouse designers will guide its clients on why a chair sweats if the material used isn't right or how noise can be controlled in an office environ by selecting good sound-proof panels.

Declining to share revenue figures, Mathur says that the company's institutional sales have grown by 27 per cent over the previous year.

"This has helped to enhance the company's image. The idea is to make people aware of what we can do," he adds. Apart from the Knowledge Centres, the company also has 30 other regular showrooms across the country.