Spun all over again

FURNISHINGS: Welspun has new brands and ideas.

Welspun India, the Rs 678-crore flagship of the Welspun group, and a major exporter of home linen, is looking to engage the domestic market for home furnishings afresh with its brand Spaces. The aim is to lure the upmarket consumer who'd turn a nose up at what's typically available in India.

"The urban Indian consumer is evolving, and that has forced us to cater to changing demands," says Deepali Goenka, director, Welspun. "Consumers aren't content with bedsheets with a threadcount of 200 "" they now demand 600," she continues.

Add to that, perfumed bedsheets (that Goenka insists lasts 200 washes), new fabrics extracted from milk protein, soya bean and bamboo fibre, Vitamin E-treated bedsheets and an organically produced cotton range.

The idea, says Welspun, is to lead the value curve rather than follow it, meeting consumer needs that are still unvoiced.

The new products are available at Spaces Home and Beyond, Welspun's lifestyle retail outlet, apart from some other outlets. The prices start at Rs 1,795, and the products will not be stocked at Welspun's value retail model, Home Mart.

"Value retail will always provide us topline growth, but brand positioning and our bottomlines will increasingly be driven by high value growth," she says.

Welspun's domestic retail business notched up Rs 40 crore in 2005-06, and Goenka is projecting Rs 100 crore this fiscal. This will be driven by a rapid rollout of 150 additional showrooms (a third, premium).

Welspun's domestic sales, currently just a tenth of the turnover, could go up to a fifth in a year or so. In January 2007, it expects to launch the home linen brand Christy in India, priced just above Spaces. This is a brand acquired in July along with an 85-per cent stake in UK's CHT Holdings, which markets Christy.

Meanwhile, Welspun have more than doubled production capacity this year by adding a unit at Anjar (with a current capacity of 20,000 tonnes of towelling and 35 million metres of bedsheets).

As a backward integration measure, the company is also looking to get into contract farming of cotton by year-end. Roughly 100 to 200 acres will be brought under its charge, to be raised to 2,000 acres by the end of 2007.