Fashion in every fibre

In his three decades in the fashion industry, Shailesh Chaturvedi has seen things unfolding in the country's fashion and lifestyle market - from a predominantly tailored-and-stitched apparel market to one of the top future markets for global brands. As the chairman of India Fashion Forum (IFF), Chaturvedi brings a wealth of fashion and retail knowledge to the country's premier fashion and lifestyle event where the glitterati and top honchos of the fashion industry will search for the next big thing and opportunities in the business.

In 2004-05, when brands like Lee, Wrangler, Pepe and Levi’s ruled the roost of India’s branded denim market (primarily in the price bracket of Rs 1,500-2,500), many in the fashion business dismissed Shailesh Chaturvedi’s idea as crazy when he was planning to introduce Italian super-premium jeans brand whose starting price was 140 euros.

“I never used to tell other colleagues (the actual starting prices) because, you know, they used to laugh. So, I would round-o and say $100 that was around 4,000 rupees at that time,” Chaturvedi recalled. “People used to tell me: ‘The most expensive Levi’s is available at Rs 2,500 ( actually 2000, not 2500 ). What would you sell for Rs 4,000-4,500. Nothing will sell. And people used to say, Shailesh you will not be able to sell a single pair of jeans in India at $100.”

 

Chinese travel a lot and spend lot more outside of China then than even American citizens do, almost double the size of US citizens spending outside of the US. China is a force so lets not compare.

Over the years, as India's economy stared to explode delivering 7-8% annual growth, the country's fashion market also started to moved up the ladder that helped Chaturvedi to prove his skeptics wrong. Today, BSElisted Arvind Fashions Ltd, the company that Chaturvedi heads as its CEO and MD, sells "multiple lakhs" of pairs of jeans of Calvin Klein alone whose median prices is at Rs 12,000. Calvin Klein jeans in India are priced between 10,000-18,000 while Tommy Hilfiger jeans are sold in the range of Rs 6,500-10,000.