With years of hands-on experience sourcing apparels, Alliance Merchandising Inc., a Delhi based buying office, claims to have gone from strength to strength to enter the new phase of home furnishing, moving from doing basics to high fashion home products. Today the buying office caters to the needs of the bigger brands like Anthropologie, Crate and Barrel, Woolworths, Max Mara, Louis Vuitton, DKNY and John Lewis. Harmeet Singh, President, Alliance Merchandising Inc. in a tete-e-tete with Team Apparel Online shares about the company, products and the growth strategy…
Even with the European markets substantially getting sluggish, the buying operations of Alliance Merchandising has not been much affected especially in the home furnishing segment as it has spread its reach to markets like South Africa, Japan, Brazil, England, France, Italy and USA. “Things are not selling that well in Europe, which is no doubt impacting business, but we have had a mixed impact of the slowdown, since our customer base is versatile, so, if one market is slow, we are doing better somewhere else,” reasons Harmeet.
Catering to mainly big chains with good volumes, Alliance Merchandising has witnessed tremendous growth with its rich varieties of organic bedding, cushion covers, quilts, candle stands, furnished items, vintage products and other home furnishing accessories to the world. “As of now we have bulk orders from the American buyer Crate and Barrel in organic home décor products,” informs Harmeet.
Taking design inspiration from the apparel segment, Harmeet is always on the lookout for stimulation and inspiration which may come from anywhere, be it old world charm, interesting textile or a quirky item on the street… almost anything. “We have our own design studio and my wife is also involved in designing and product development, she derives a lot of inspiration from the vintage products which we buy from across the globe and tries to transform these ideas into the products which could be commercially viable and also appeal to our customers. Many a time the buyers also share their ideas and we incorporate it with our design sensibility. It’s a partnership, they give us lot of tools to work on and vice versa, it’s a great combination,” avers Harmeet.
Sourcing exclusively from India, the niche for the company still remains handwork. “Our core strength and specialization is in the handcrafted products by which I mean a lot of value addition done by hand.” He further adds, “For almost 8 years I did volume orders with medium size firms but changed completely to top-end markets because I wanted Indian artists to benefit from it. Now the buyer can see the kind of work we do and appreciate it as our calibre (handwork, hand embroidery). If we do basic kind of work, we will have lot of competitors and sustaining business becomes difficult.”
Working with different techniques of hand embroiders, from Aari work to needle point work, the company wants to experiment with handlooms and Chikankari products also to diversify and move into more decorative styles. “The only problem with handlooms is at the testing levels; no matter how beautiful the product/fabric is if it fails the testing procedures we cannot take it. As far as Chikankari work is concerned, it is another project which we tried in Delhi but failed. I am keen to work with Seva organization for this project but it’s a long process and I need someone to be deputed there, but couldn’t find the right people,” asserts Harmeet.
The company is sourcing mainly from a vendor based in Delhi, Ludhiana and Jaipur. “Delhi is the strongest in handwork for us and Jaipur for block printing. We have built up strong relations with our vendors and trained them as per our needs. We are extremely happy with our vendors as they come out with best results,” elaborates Harmeet.
Having started with volume orders with a small factory which was the winning formula in India initially, the company is now geared to handle small to bulk volumes for high-end markets too. Buying for both home textiles and apparels, Harmeet feels that home textiles business is much easier as compared to apparel business. “Unlike apparel, where there are customized sizes, home furnishing is a much easier business as there is no concern related to size and fitting and stitching is straight and simple so manufacturing is much faster,” reasons Harmeet.
Happily positioned, Harmeet concludes, “We are strongly based in the US and Europe and now we are focusing on Japanese and Brazilian markets. As of now, we are not coming up with anything new in terms of product categories and in case we do come up with something exciting we will experiment with our existing customer base before testing in newer markets.”
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