My Cottage Industry

A recent financial crunch has got me thinking about the future and security of Brass Tacks. I’m not referring to the recession but rather my current bank balance. I’ve been ordering fabric in large quantities to feed my store as well as the Brass Tacks section at Daaram (Hyderabad), but it’s going to take a long time for sales to pick up there and for me to recover those costs. The good news is that the low bank balance has motivated me to think of new sales solutions like the new pricing scheme and the idea of brighter colours for future collections. What I need to focus on next are issue of scale. How viable are some of my measures for quality control as the company grows bigger?

Take, for example, the issue of fabric shrinkage. To guarantee my customers that none of my clothes will shrink I have them all washed once. If a fabric has a loose weave, it is soaked for an hour and then washed. If the shrinkage is very high, it is washed again to shrink a second time. This process also gets rid of surface dyes and any nasty smell that the fabric has absorbed during its long train journey to Chennai. Right now all the fabric is washed by the woman who washes clothes at my parents’ house. It started out with tiny quantities of 30 metres of fabric per week, but as the company has grown the quantities have gone up (I’m embarrassed to admit how much fabric I send home every week). It just doesn’t make sense for me to send all the fabric home- it seems so unprofessional and so cottage industry-ish for a company that wants to operate like a mini industry. However at the moment I don’t have another solution. There must be large industrial machines out there that mimic a “gentle handwash” process for handwoven fabrics, but I haven’t had the time to research them yet.

Until Brass Tacks has more creative solutions for the not-so-easy-to-scale stuff, we’re still washing all our fabric in-house (literally). And since both my parents were out of town last week and none of their domestic help came to work, the next best (and immediate) solution for some kora coloured khadi fabric to be shrunk was for me to wash it. Oh well, at least the dress ("Lady Bird") got made in time for weekend sales.

Big Picture with Little Details

In my most focused moments at work, I am a bit neurotic about little details. I look at a garment and scream when one arm hole looks bigger than the other, and I walk into my store and remind myself to take deep breaths when I see paint peeling off the walls (I’ll never get to the bottom of that annoying leakage problem). I often get annoyed when people tell me that these little details are not important and it’s the big picture that matters. But to me the details are everything and without that you have nothing! Of course when I’m feeling less neurotic or a bit lazy then I’m able to shrug it off (told you not to sweat the small stuff), but of late I’ve realized that it’s not about small details versus the big picture. The two go hand in hand and it is vital to keep switching back and forth to stay on track (and to maintain your sanity).

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this- it does seem like intuitive common sense after all- but two incidents last week helped me arrive at this conclusion. The first was an exchange between Mala Sinha of Bodhi and me. I wrote a post about Mala last year when I visited her workshop in Baroda. Recently I wanted to place an order with her and I was so impressed to receive these “strike offs” in the print I had asked for with various colour options. I had asked for this print (shown below) in indigo on tussar fabric. Before going into production, Mala sent me a few options including her personal recommendation (indigo on light blue) that ended up looking much nicer than what I had originally ordered. How many printers will take that kind of trouble to show you a different colour options on the fabric you want? Most of them will just tell you that different fabrics absorb colour differently and that you should not expect a 100% colour match.


(Mala's strike offs. The right most one was her recommendation).

Thinking about Mala’s service made me realize that for every one of her buyers who places an order, there must be at least ten others who ask for different colour variations but don’t follow up with an order. Providing that service to everyone must take up a lot of time and effort, however if she didn’t provide that service, then she might not have people like me writing about her or a set of loyal customers who appreciate her consistent good quality. Taking effort over the little details does pay off in this case.

The second incident was a mildly unpleasant experience with a retail store last month after which I realized that if I don’t think about the bigger picture and the long run, then I might be setting myself up for more experiences similar to this one. The experience in question had to do with the retail store not taking enough care about the little details that really matter (like sales statements and listing of inventory with a clear system for summing up totals, calculating commission, etc). At my own store when I see details left out of the accounts book or the inventory book (yes, it’s still handwritten but we’re going electronic in a month) I freak out and make sure my staff corrects the mistakes immediately. But we do have a system in place and my sales assistants know the importance of maintaining these records for our internal checks. How do businesses manage to grow if they are not picky about these little details? So instead of being impatient to make money and retailing in other cities, I need to do more homework and work with someone who gets the little details in the bigger scheme of things. Plus it doesn't hurt to have some terms and conditions agreed upon in writing.

Now that I finally get this big-picture-little-details logic, I need to figure out a way to keep reminding myself of it.

2nd Birthday

On August 10th my store turned two. This past year has been amazing in terms of learning experiences, growth and also creativity. I feel I am closer to finding my voice, I’m reaching out to more Brass Tacks customers, and I’m also incorporating suggestions without having to compromise on my creativity. Of course I’ve had some downs – perhaps a couple of downs for every up – but overall I’m really happy with the way things are going, and so grateful to everyone who has helped along the way.

During my sale last year I was surprised to see the overwhelming response; customers trooped in and out throughout the day and on the first day I sold around 40 pieces. Not all those pieces were on sale, which led me to believe that announcing a sale is also a way to remind customers that you exist.

I had a similar experience this year, selling 100 pieces in the first two days of the sale, but now I’m learning more from these sales. I think people are more willing to buy something they consider expensive if they know they can also get great value for money on some other pieces. So someone would rather buy one dress for Rs 2000 along with 2 tops for Rs 500 each, rather than one evening dress for Rs 3000. Intuitively that does make sense, but I just never thought along those lines before. Observing customers in the store is a lot more conducive to understanding their rationale than sitting in front of an excel sheet (which is how I do my pricing).

I’m now ready to try out a pricing experiment with my upcoming Monsoon collection. I want to see how I can spread my production cost across my collection to allow for some garments to be less expensive than others. Before it was an even distribution, but now it will be according to level of complexity. The simpler garments will end up being less expensive, but the more complicated ones with a lot of tailoring details will work out to be more expensive.

Getting back to the sale, things were going too well for that Corporation Shopping Complex (I’m already battling a case with a leakage in the building and no drainage on the street for rain water), so on Tuesday afternoon at 3pm the electricity went off. My inverter carried us through to the end of the day (without the air conditioner though) but all of Wednesday we had no power. One of the power lines had burnt, affecting 5 shops in the building and as luck would have it mine was one of them. The corporation waited for a few hours on Tuesday before declaring that it was too dark to start work that day. On Wednesday they hired electricians and labourers to dig up the road to find the burnt cable, which they finally found at around 6pm that day. Still giddy from Sunday’s sales, I went up to them filled with naïve enthusiasm and asked, “So it will be fixed by tonight, right”?

Electrician: Well now that we’ve found it there’s little left to do. If we don’t finish it tonight then it will take only 30 minutes to complete in the morning.

Me: Great, I’m so glad. We’ve lost out on a lot of sales because of no power today.

Electrician: The thing is, tomorrow is a government holiday, and Independence day is coming up on Saturday, so we were hoping to get a long weekend starting from this evening….

Note: To compensate for days lost without power, after Independence day on Saturday (we will be closed on August 15th), we will continue with the sale for another week.

Chasing After Suppliers

I have never really understood why suppliers have a pricey approach to their customers. I am talking about weavers, printers, tie-dyers and large textile cooperatives who promise to send swatches so I can place an order but never live up to their words. You could just chalk it down to a cultural difference or disorganization, but it’s at a higher level too. I met an urban educated manager of a large non-profit set up to promote handloom fabric at a craft exhibition in February and only after incessant emails and phone calls did I finally get some swatches (gorgeous ones, however) last week.

What is sometimes frustrating is that I try to do whatever it takes to keep my customers happy (like driving to a customer’s house to deliver her urgent alteration on Christmas day) but very few suppliers think of their clients as customers who are giving them business. I tell my sales staff that we have to be polite to every customer, even if we know some are bigger shoppers and others are just window shoppers. It is the opportunity that a window shopper today will buy something for herself tomorrow that we don’t want to lose out on. Plus, I want everyone who comes to my store to have a pleasant experience; it’s just not nice to discriminate.

With fabric suppliers I have to call and introduce myself to ask for swatches (sample cuttings), follow up with a text message (sms) to tell them my office address, call again a few days later to remind them, and so on. At first I used to think it’s because they knew my order quantities would eventually be small, which means I was less important than some of their bigger buyers, but recently while talking to a manager of a large cooperative I made sure I didn’t mention my order quantities. Perhaps they are heavily understaffed and have no one else to pass the job onto. But if that is the case -and I empathize completely- wouldn’t it be easier to be up front about it rather than ignoring emails or saying the swatches will be sent the next day?

There are exceptions to the rule (Eco-Tasar in Delhi is run very professionally) and there is an interesting pattern I am seeing in these suppliers with service inertia. Very often I have found that the suppliers who took ages to send me swatches are the ones who had the more interesting textile designs and better quality work. For example, after 8 months of calling my cut-work supplier in Varanasi and pestering him with text messages, I received some beautiful swatches the other day (pics below). This means that with a little thick skin and persistence, it is possible to get to the good stuff.


Cut-work swatches from Prabha Traders (more delicate and flowery than my usual favourites, but beautiful nevertheless).

Staying Motivated for Others

A few months ago when I had contacted a recruitment agency to hire more sales staff, I had an interesting conversation with the woman who runs the agency. I was describing the kind of person I wanted to hire for the position of a sales manager and I said that aside from speaking English reasonably well, and having a sense of customer service, the candidate needs to be a motivated person who wants to move ahead in her career. The woman replied saying that most people are used to just taking orders rather than thinking for themselves and taking initiative. I feel that is so true of many people, at a variety of levels. Most of us settle into a comfort zone and a kind of complacency where we are just doing our everyday tasks without striving for more. I know that I too am often guilty of this. I go through my phases of high motivation levels, but I tend to burn myself out and then spend so much time recovering that I may as well have done things at a steady pace in the first place. But what is it that helps people to stay motivated?

When I quit my job in New York a few years ago to intern for two designers, I worked for free and used up all my savings. As a general rule I think unpaid internships are a bad idea- I think hard working people need to be rewarded in some way- but for me it was an opportunity to do something in fashion, a field that I knew so little about, and get some exposure before I moved back to Chennai and started my own company. That fact that I didn’t get paid for my work didn’t affect my level of motivation, but what did help was being around highly motivated and driven people (and when my managers weren’t motivated, it definitely set a more laid-back atmosphere that I would imbibe).

I think about Brass Tacks pretty much all the time, awake or asleep. Sometimes I am tired but do my work anyway because I “have to”, and at other times I am really motivated and positive, and do my work with enthusiasm. At all times however, my goal is very clear to me (that I need to put in this effort in order to reach the next step).

Lately, I’ve not been feeling very motivated. The long drives to work, the slow activity at the store, and just the relentless amounts of work have left me feeling a bit frustrated, tired and unmotivated. At times like these I really miss being in an environment where I am surrounded by highly motivated people who are passionate about what they do. If I feel this way about my own business, I can only imagine how my sales staff feel on days when few customers walk into the store. So perhaps it all boils down to how motivated I am, because the energy that I exude does affect my surroundings. I need to spend more time at the store (rather than in the comfort of my home office) to create a stimulating work environment for them. And since there is a high turnover rate with sales staff, there really is no permanent solution to this.

A fallback for fallbacks

Starting a business (and I know I’m not the first one to say this) is like being on a nonstop treadmill: as some things slowly fall into place, others begin to fall out of place. There are rare occasions when things go well for a few weeks, but sooner or later, something crops up that has to be attended to right away. Last week however, was filled with crises, one after the other, and coming after a few months of work (and my wedding planning) I was so overwhelmed and couldn’t help but feel a bit defeated.

My Spring Collection photo-shoot was scheduled for Tuesday of last week. We (my photographer and I) normally plan the shoot for a weekend for the model’s convenience, but this time the clothes were not ready in time and my photographer was busy until Monday. The model was nice enough to take a day off work to accommodate our schedules (and my urgency to usher in the new collection at least a week before my wedding)!

Now here is a short recap of the days preceding the shoot just to give you a picture of my mental framework on Tuesday: a few weeks before this, one out of my two sales staff at the store told me he needs to take a few days off work from the 8^th to the 11^th. My weekly holiday at my store is Tuesdays, so I thought that between my other sales person and me, we could cover his shift and we’d be fine. On the 8^th morning my second sales person called to say her uncle had passed away and that she would not be coming to work that day. I was okay with the news- this was unexpected and she was in tears when she called over the phone. I went to open the store myself on Sunday and actually got some work done too. The next day I assumed my second sales staff would come to work, but she didn’t. She didn’t call either so I found out late that she hadn’t turned up. I was so busy coordinating the production and making the props for the photoshoot that I decided to not open the store that day. I was so upset that she hadn’t even called however, and I think that was what started to ruin my mood. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to not have high expectations of the people who work for me. In my mind I felt that since she knew that my other sales person was on leave until Thursday, she should have tried to make it or at the very least call to tell me she cannot. I know it’s rare to find people who are accountable and who feel a sense of ownership- but it's hard to accept when I’m upset! I wish I had kept my cool, because I allowed my being upset to completely ruin my mood and I cancelled a meeting with a photographer from the Times of India that was scheduled for that afternoon at my store.

I was at a stage where I decided to just take each step as it came. That evening I picked up the model and we were scheduled to start shooting the next morning at 8am, after the make-up artist was done. We started on time, but by 10am, the electricity supply got cut off. A phone-call to the Electric Board supply told me that the power would come back only at 5pm! I called for a generator. There are less than a handful of companies that will rent out a generator for just one day, and almost all of them couldn’t send one right away. Finally one arrived at around noon, but after 30 minutes of trying to get it started, we realized that it wasn’t going to work. I called another generator, and my photographer called his friend who lived close by and who owned a generator. We used both generators and resumed our shoot at 2pm.

The shoot went well and I’m so glad we had such a patient and hard-working model who kept her spirits up right up until we wrapped up at 8pm. I have hired generators in the past as a backup, but we never had to use them so I guess I got complacent. Now I know better!

The next day I opened the store myself and my fiancé came to help out in the afternoon. On Thursday both my sales staff came back. I’m now on the search for another sales person. It’s important to have a full time backup, so now the chances that between the three of them at least one person will show up to work everyday is much higher!

Below are a few pictures of the creative shots that we took on Tuesday.

This newspaper boat took ages to make. I stuck sheets together to make this stiffer and thicker, and started making the boat from a 10 x 10 feet square.

The newspaper jacket with the pleats was meant to match the pin tucks and pleats on the cotton top, but with the lighting and the bold pleats on the jacket, the ones on the cotton top don't really show.

Fresh Air, Fresh Ideas

Whenever I feel burdened with mundane work to the point where I’m losing sight of my goal and I don’t have enough time to design, I usually plan a trip to meet with suppliers. These trips always motivate and refresh me, reminding me of what’s more important than the small details: the bigger picture in relation to the handloom and textile crafts industry in India.

July and August this year were difficult months with staff issues, so as soon as they were somewhat under control I took off with my mom on a short trip to Ahmedabad and Baroda. In Baroda I went to visit Mala Sinha, a textile designer who graduated from NID. Mala runs her own company called Bodhi, and she prints her own designs on saris and yardage.

Touring the Bodhi workshop was like discovering my dream factory. A “colour kitchen” has dyes neatly stored with apparatus to make sure the correct dye amount (it’s measured and weighed) is used for each shade. Recipes for shades and colour combinations are documented for each print, and this is done separately for each fabric because different yarns have different capacities to absorb colour. I have had many experiences with my handloom and block-print suppliers not being able to match colour swatches or not being able to replicate their own work in the same colour shades. Mala makes it look so easy with her documents for how to replicate each print. If only other weavers and printers had her vision. Mala should really get invited to run a training workshop that other printers and tie-dyers can attend!

Another feature that motivated me at the Bodhi workshop was the use and recycling of rain water. Rainwater is collected in large tanks every monsoon and that water is used for washing and dyeing. The used water goes to a filter system with Canna plants that clean the water. That water is re-used again for fabric washing and dyeing. Seeing the impressive system there reminded me of another one of my long term goals: helping my suppliers set up infrastructure that is more environmentally friendly. My fiance was the one who first commented on the effluence created by dyeing when we visited my leheria supplier in Jaipur. Most craftsmen have a small setup with no treatment plant for their waste water, so it just flows out to the drainage system and will probably damage the soil. Bodhi’s water treatment plant is simple and effective, and a fabulous example to anyone who wants to be responsible about their production process.

Below are pictures from the Bodhi workshop/factory.

The precision required to measure dyes.

[Colourful] Grey water before the purification process and the Canna filter bed.

Mala Sinha of Bodhi

Butter Biscuits Door Delivered from Airtel

A couple of weeks ago I shifted my production unit from the heart of the city to the outskirts (in the hope that moving closer to a large bus terminal will make it easier to recruit tailors). A week before the move I called Airtel to tell them that I would need my landline and broadband connection shifted to the new office. I asked how long the entire process takes (from disconnecting the old landline and setting up the new one) and I was pleasantly surprised when they said it can be done on the same day. I made a request for that day to be Saturday, the day of our move. Incidentally if you call Airtel’s toll free number to ask for a shift in location they ask you to call their landline service centre (044-42112345) that isn’t toll free unless you are calling from an Airtel landline.

On Friday my old landline got disconnected. I called Airtel and Kavitha, at their office, said that this could not have been avoided. I asked to speak to her supervisor, and Kavitha replied confidently saying her supervisor would say the same thing. She also said her supervisor would call me back in 10 minutes, but no one called back from Airtel that day. The next day I was busy with my move, but I got a call on my cell phone from a technician asking me when he could come to the new place to connect my new landline. I asked him to come to the new address that afternoon but he did a no-show. I called back but no one picked up. I called the Airtel helpline number and no one picked that up either. All day on Saturday, Sunday and on Monday (Diwali) no one picked up either phones. On Tuesday morning I called the Airtel helpline again. This time Diana picked up and said my new connection would be fixed the same day. I asked to speak to her supervisor but she insisted that she could handle my problem and would not transfer me to her supervisor. Annoyed and worried that my complaint was not really registered, I called back a couple of hours later. This time I spoke to Zia who assured me that it would be done by the end of the day. I warned him that the office closed at 6pm so a technician had to start his work at the office before that. By 5:45pm, no one had arrived. I called Airtel and spoke to Karthik and then Selvakumar. Neither of them were able to pull up my complaints on their computer. In other words, there was no complaint registered with them that I needed this connection done as soon as possible. Finally one of them agreed to transfer me to their supervisor, Lakshmi. She assured me that they were going to treat this as a priority and that the new connection would be completed the next day morning.

By this time I was frustrated, but more than anything else I was just irritated! All those calls (that I was obviously charged for since I couldn't make them from my not-yet-connected landline) and all that time being asked to stay on hold had still not resulted in a registered complaint! The next morning no one arrived. I called back and spoke to Vasanth, then Gopinath, Dilip and finally Preethi. They all said it would be done by the end of the day. I decided to just wait until the job was done but also sent in a complaint via email to Airtel to the following addresses:
care.tamilnadu@airteltelephone.com
Nodal.TN@airtel.in
nodal.southabts@airtel.in

I didn’t hear back from anyone via email other than the auto response saying my complaint would be attended to within 24 working hours (does that mean 4 days of 8 hours each?) Meanwhile a technician came to fix my landline on Wednesday and my internet connection was fixed only on Friday, a week after my old line had been disconnected.

The following Monday I received a tin of Butter Biscuits (made from margarine) from Airtel. There was no note or letter, so I assume that this is their way of responding to my complaint. I wish there was a way I could tell them (and have them register what I want to say) that refunding someone’s phone bill might melt their frustration away a lot more effectively than margarine.

One Solution to the Tailor Crisis

Last week I was supposed to launch my Monsoon Collection in the store. I had the pictures from the photo-shoot ready to mail out along with my press kits, I had started telling customers at the store to lookout for our new collection on September 6th, and I had planned a trip to Ahmedabad and Jaipur later this month to meet with suppliers after I launched the collection in the store. I had a big problem though: the clothes weren’t ready. In the last month one of my tailors has taken indefinite paternity leave, one has left to join a more lucrative job closer to his home, and another left to move back home to be with his wife and kids where he will take up a job as an auto driver.

I have spent the last two weeks calling everyone I know in the garment industry, but everyone tells me that their situation is similar: it’s tough to recruit new tailors, the existing ones don’t show up for work regularly, many of them prefer to work at a small tailoring shop where the hours are flexible and they get paid per piece (which means no one to question quality as long as they are churning out sari blouses by the hour).

Or, they could leave the tailoring profession altogether for more lucrative jobs elsewhere.

There is a dearth of quality labour in India but the economy is growing and every business needs people. Salesmen at Lifestyle barely speak English, let alone understand what products are stocked there, but I am willing to bet they get paid more than the average tailor. Plus who wouldn’t like to work in a large air-conditioned mall rather than slog at a sewing machine? Large banks need “office boys” and chain supermarkets need cashiers and helpers at their stores, so all the large export factories who need tailors at reasonable salaries have moved far out of the city, where the job options are agriculture, manual labour at a factory, and now tailoring.

I met with the principal of the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) two weeks ago. AEPC was set up by the government to train and supply the garment industry with manpower at every level- tailors, cutters, pattern makers, and supervisors. The principal said they are finding it hard to recruit tailors because being tailor is no longer a very lucrative option compared to other jobs that are available in the market.

I took that as sign (one among many) and my solution has been to increase my average salary for tailors. Obviously moving out of the city to attract tailors who live in villages isn’t an option for me, but then again people are hopefully buying my clothes because of the style and the fit – my profit isn’t determined by price alone unlike for many export factories. I hired two new tailors from AEPC (we’ll train them up to our quality standards and I can only hope that they stay as we give them a raise for every stage of improvement) and I gave my existing tailors a finder’s fee for using their network to find new recruits and that resulted in another two tailors. Now I am back in production for my monsoon collection.

Here is a preview of what will be in the store on October 5th:

Family Labour

I read a news story a few days ago about an Irish company (Primark) that cancelled a huge order from a knitwear exporter in Tirupur because they had heard the exporter was using child labour. It turns out that the export unit itself doesn't employ anyone underage, but they had outsourced some embroidery to a refugee camp where families were working together to complete the job. A follow up article the next day revealed that while children were present when the embroidery was being done, they were not actually doing any of the embroidery themselves. However a story like this has the potential to make Primark look like an exploiter of cheap labour, so the only decision left for the company was to cancel all their orders.

The first thing that struck me when I read the article was how family labour in a traditional setting can easily be misinterpreted as a system that forces children to work from a young age. Some of our traditional systems are at conflict with today’s laws and “industry standards”, and it is difficult for grass roots level organizations to meet the standards.

Now before I am misinterpreted, let me clarify that I am not for one second condoning child labour. I am anti child labour, anti sweat shop, and pro healthy and sanitary working conditions. I also think that for large factory-like environments (such as the exporter in Tirupur) having an acceptable standard is a good thing. However there is a difference between a company employing children for labour versus a family working on something where children are occasionally asked to chip in. With traditional textile crafts that are handed down from generation to generation, it would be impossible for the children to never be involved in the process while growing up.

Take for example my leheria supplier whose house and factory I visited last year. My supplier’s father had worn a national award for his leheria (tie-dye) work and since then the family has been invited to craft exhibitions all over India. My supplier must have been exposed to the craft at a young age but I don’t know the details of when he started working for his father’s company. I’m using the word “company” very loosely here- they live in an intricate weave of small lanes in a large neigbourhood where every house doubles as a mini-factory or store of some sort. The ground floor of their house (one large room and a shed) is their factory, where fabric is stored, tie-dyed, dried, and packed. The family lives upstairs, but during the day the children wander around the shed playing with the dyes and the older children may help with a few tasks on a Saturday morning. For the most part the work is done by the two sons (both in their 40s) and a few of their employees.

Aside from my selfish interest in wanting the next generation to learn the ropes so that Brass Tacks will always have a leheria supplier, they too have dreams of growing their business and that would have to involve help from family. Would the operations going on in their hall and shed pass any international standard for health and labour conditions? I’m not sure, but I do know that it would take time, years of good business and exposure for them to have nicer facilities in a larger building with an environmentally friendly way of disposing their dyes, and large, safe utensils for dyeing their fabric (right now they boil the dye and dip the cloth into it using thick rubber gloves). Pass or fail, their craft cannot be learned easily and since it is a family business, it would make sense that their children learn the craft at a young age. That’s not child labour, it’s called training.

I can only hope that with time and with the help of organizations and buyers (like Brass Tacks), my suppliers can have a nicer set up with better systems and a creative way to show visitors that the children are not working full time. Because if my suppliers want their business to grow and supply fabric at a large scale, they will have to find a way to pass these standards.

Below are a few pictures of the work done at my supplier's workshop in Jaipur.