Fabindia

“Bring customers a choice of products – and lifestyle – that offers an alternative to the mass-produced, while creating sustainable livelihoods in the rural sector” ------- the mantra been followed by Fabindia for 50+ years now and is very much installed in all the employees.

Established by John Bissell in 1960 and now under the leadership of William Bissell is the best-known urban middle class brand in India. The leaders strongly believe in empowering weavers so as to bring back the long lost culture to life thus making profits.

Entering into a Fabindia store, gives you an immense happy feeling as the aura and welcome smile on the faces of employees refreshes you for an incoming experience. The layout takes you to a time where handcrafted and weaved work was highly appreciated which badly craves one to go ahead for the purchase. The best part of this brand is that the layout and feel is same in almost all the stores.

The company operates on the model of community based businesses. Herein company works with SRCs(Supplier region companies) which further source products from weavers who are traditionally well versed in the craft but are not formally trained. Designers work directly with artisans teaching much required technical skills and ensuring the product quality.

SRCs provides innovation and design to the artisans who further incorporates same in the hand crafted products. The company made each and every artisans, craftsman, employees a shareholder thus giving the feel of a perfect equal team.

Brand has been successfully attracting revenues of Rs 1000 crore in 2013-2014 however the model fails in two very important aspects where it successfully losses a huge chunk of customers.

First and foremost is Brand Advertising- the company believes in advertising through “word of mouth”. It was with which the company started and seems to still stuck up on the brand for long now. Secondly and most important is Supply chain management. Since stores directly places orders with SRCs, the communities are lacking in understanding the product forecast and thus same product is not available in stores on second visit.

The combination of these two is really lethal. Carrying on with a beautiful mission and a vision, the company lacks on these two pillars due to which they are losing on a big chunk of customer base. The leaders need to re-invent strategies so as to lead the brand in more urban families.

Never the less the brand has successfully made it presence felt. Fabindia’s working model is an inspiration to many startups thus the concept of entrepreneur ship is taking good pace in India.