Mail order returns

DIRECT SELLING: Elvy, a mail order venture, thinks the time is just right for the concept in upmarket India.

Suave and mild-mannered, Lovy Khosla appears to have taken upon himself an uphill task. At a time when the Indian consumer is being feted as someone on the lookout for the ultimate "customer experience", which means all the snazz and attention that retail stores can summon, Khosla plans to woo her right where she is "" at home. Khosla is in the mail order business.

Through his Elvy mail order catalogue, the 40-year-old entrepreneur dreams of revolutionising shopping in India. As managing director of Stalwart Creations, which has been supplying traditional lifestyle products to wholesalers, retailers, interior designers and catalogue companies around the globe for 55 years, Khosla claims a fine understanding of the remote purchase dynamics.

"I had been wanting to come to the Indian retail business for some time and sell these fine lifestyle products. This is what I've been doing for foreign catalogues like Pottery Barn and others. So in a way, this is forward integration," says an upbeat Khosla.

But are Indian buyers ready for catalogue shopping yet?

Khosla would like to believe so. And refuses to be deterred by the Otto Burlington example. "Burlington was a different story. To begin, with it was an altogether different scenario 15 years ago "" the infrastructure, timing and mindset were all different. There were virtually no credit cards then. The whole crux of the mail order business is convenience, and the basic infrastructure that a catalogue company requires is an efficient distribution setup "" which was missing," emphasises Khosla.

Moreover, Elvy is into an entirely different set of products, most of which are not available in India. With a range of 260 lifestyle products, the first version of Elvy catalogues (claimed print run: 60,000 copies) promises a shopping experience that has been only available in developed markets of the West.

Apart from catalogues which sell for Rs 100 each, redeemable against the purchase of any product therein, the Elvy venture includes retail outlets as well as a website. The first two outlets at Gurgaon and MG Road in Delhi are likely to be followed by strategically located stores across the country. The venture's initial investment: Rs 20 crore.

The products will not just be sourced from Elvy's own units in Muradabad, Gurgaon, Firozabad, Saharanpur and Jodhpur, but from as many as 12 countries across the world.

As for the catalogue, "each page tells a story, a lot of thought and design has gone into it", says Khosla. The idea is to give the customer a real sense of "touch and feel".

The pricing model of the products has been devised to spur market development, according to Khosla. Sourcing costs are low too. "We are bringing in these fine products at good rates because we buy them from factories directly," he says.

Profits, thus, hinge on volumes going past a threshold point "" even while supply chain costs stay low and distribution systems maintain efficiency.