Textile tales

OUR BIG IDEA

Lalit and Priti Malick have had a topsy turvy business career. Malick started in 1983 with Vibgyor, a garment exporting company, which he had some initial sucess with until he ran into trouble in 1987.

His wife, meanwhile had registered her own company, Personal Creations, a few years before him. When they both got on board this company, with her at the production end and him at the distribution end, they managed to make their joint venture work. Today, Personal Creations has a turnover of Rs 17 crore, and is looking to expand its business abroad with a foray into seamless garments.

Settling down
Lalit: I've always been a bit of a wanderer. I started out in cinematography, but quickly got bored of it. I spent two years in Malaysia in the late '70s trying to discover myself, and finally I decided on garments as a career. I came back to India in 1982 and worked for six months with an export house to learn the ropes of the business.

Soon after, with a capital of Rs 20,000 (I didn't need much since production was outsourced), I started Vibgyor out of one room in Shahpur Jat in New Delhi. I was lucky initially because a client of the export house I used to work with found he could not get an order filled from them, and so he came to me, giving me my first break.

I was doing quite well, and had a turnover of Rs 22 lakh in 1987, until things started to go wrong. A client I had in the US did not pay on receipt of a shipment, and I was driven almost to bankruptcy. I was Rs 45 lakh in debt and had a net worth of Rs 2 lakh "" and that's when Priti came into the picture.

Starting over
Priti: I've always wanted to start something on my own, ever since I was 20 and worked in an export house. Just for fun, I decided to start my own company "" I picked a name, designed a logo and even had it registered.

Of course then, it wasn't serious, I didn't have any financial backing (my parents are from a working family and there was never any question of getting capital from them) and I wasn't really very confident either "" I never thought anything would come of it.

Still, when I was at the export house, I was always learning the ropes about garment export. I didn't just sit in my department; I wandered around and learned what all the other departments had to teach me as well.

I met Lalit in 1986 because he'd had placed orders with my employer. When the company left Delhi, he even offered me a job, in fact as partner (which by the way I still haven't been paid for!). When Vibgyor ran into problems, we realised that the best thing to do would be to start taking my firm off, and repay Vibgyor's debts that way.

Lalit: Luckily, we already had a client on board "" a New Zealander. His was the first business we got for Personal Creations, which really started to take off in 1989. It repaid all of Vibgyor's loans as early as 1991; Priti and I got married in 1992, and bought our house in 1993.

Priti: When the New Zealand company came on board, we had no money at all. When he asked for our samples, we had to tell him that the ones he was looking at were the only ones we had! He gave us an advance of Rs 20,000 to make more samples, and when we shipped them out, we got an order in return for Rs 9 lakh!

Even that order we had to take an advance to fulfill. Now we have six clients, retail in countries like Spain and Australia and have a turnover of Rs 17 crore. We've even launched a retail store in Barcelona called "Priti", and we're now looking at a foray into seamless garments. We've already invested Rs 23 crore in a plant in Manesar, which has 13 machines that can make a seamless garment in seven minutes.

Lalit: I really believe that the reason we've been so successful is that we've never chosen to follow money. We don't reproduce units "" if we did, we could probably have been worth a lot more!

We design our own things, and we really believe in what we do. We're confident, despite the huge investment, about our new venture too. We may be dreamers, but we've done all the market research and this is a very calculated step. Our garments reach out to people, and that's what's given us our edge.