Features

Sometime in January this year, a group of 20-odd people had gathered at a textiles facility in the Peenya Industrial Area on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The occasion was the inauguration of two state-of-the-art printing machines that Fashion Matrix Overseas (FMO) had just installed. The sleek new machines had been purchased from Israel-based industry giant Kornit Digital, and officials of both Kornit and FMO were visibly animated about the event, and what it would to their respective businesses...

About four years ago, the Karnataka government was accused of diverting 10,000 acres of land for various defence, scientific and developmental projects. The merits or demerits of the land-grab allegations aside, there was a rather interesting and disconcerting element that kept cropping up—that the state government thought there was no issue of note with the land concerned, for it was perceived to be a virtual wasteland, a swathe of unusable land that was now being put to good use. Therein lies...

Estimates vary, but trends are by and large clear: e-commerce is growing, and fashion has emerged as a critical component driving online sales in India. The year 2016 saw a flurry of activities in the e-commerce space, with a lot of these related to apparel. The question in one’s mind is no more of whether e-commerce will grow or at what rate; it is now more about the dynamics of the fashion segment itself, as also about who will race ahead in online fashion sales. Of Numbers, Trends and...

Brexit. Trump. TPP, RCEP. Amazon. Innumerable keywords kept cropping up through 2016, but not all of these will shape fashion, nay the textiles and apparel industry, in 2017. But some will dictate the direction that the fashion industry takes in the years to come, and the process starts with 2017. Myntra’s acquisition of Jabong: In July, Flipkart’s Myntra pipped Snapdeal to the post by acquiring online fashion store Jabong for $70 million. Though Jabong itself had been on a downswing since 2013...

In September this year, leading fabric and fashion retailer Raymond decided to truncate its workforce by a third. The company decided to replace 10,000 of its employees with robots. And this was a company that employed roughly 30,000 people across 16 manufacturing units across the country. Raymond CEO Sanjay Behl told a newspaper on the occasion, “Roughly 2,000 work in each plant. Through technological intervention we are looking to scale down the number of jobs to 20,000, through multiple...

The fashion industry, across the chain from fibre to retail, is an extremely dynamic one. Most aspects of the industry often make for stimulating debates. But usually lost in these battles of ideas and predictions are the most crucial element that make each of these links in the long and fragile chain: the people. There is a need to look at the people factor too. The industry is no longer what it was at the beginning of the globalisation era. The world has changed, and so has the fashion...

Volumes have been written about the correlation between conservation and tourism in the last 20-odd years. There are ideas, and more ideas that build on the earlier ones. But to see how things work out in practice, one might have to go no further than, say, a Facebook group that serves as a platform for those concerned about irresponsible tourism, specifically in protected areas (PAs). Wildlife Viewing Ethics - It's a matter of respect Avoid getting too close Finding out about the animal will...

Sometime in the late-1990s, just months after Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai won two major international beauty pageants, a fashion consciousness started taking shape. For the uninitiated as also for common people, this was reckoned to be the turning point for Indian fashion. But the more discerning and the more aware know for certain that none of this would have been possible had the fertile ground not been laid another ten years earlier through a rather low-key initiative of the Indian...

There are natural disasters, and there are those that are man-made. The ones usuallly most catastrophic are natural disasters that are compounded and accentuated by man-made factors. When Mumbai was ravaged by just 900mm of rain over a 24-hour period leading to almost 450 fatal casualties, one might have thought that planners and policymakers would have sat upright and taken note of the ecological degradation in their own backyards: that of the wetlands both within the city limits as well as...

In September this year, German testing and certification giant TÜV SÜD announced its entry into the advisory domain for textile manufacturing in India to, as the organisation claimed, drive product innovation, process and production management across the textile value chain from fibre to garment. Sooner or later, the global industry leader had to enter the Indian market. The reasons were put in succinctly by the Senior Vice-President (Consumer Product Services) of TÜV SÜD South Asia, Suresh...