Apparel Online India Magazine May 1-15, 2019 | Page 22

BUYER SPEAK
CWI Holdings starts office in
Tirupur; aggressive planning
for India
N
o matter how challenging
the global apparel business
is going to be in future, and
whatever sourcing destinations get
preference due to any reason…,
India is definitely going to play an
important role. This perception gets
strengthened when global supply
chain or sourcing companies look
towards India with greater focus.
Cohen and Wilks International
Holdings (CWI Holding Group),
having a global business of over US $
200 million, has recently opened its
office in India and is further gearing
up to increase sourcing. With offices
in China and the UK, the company
specialises in design, innovation
and quality, and supplies apparel
clothing across men, women and
childrenswear. Zhen Sun, Owner
of the group for over 20 years now,
has grown the group portfolio by
investing in the companies in UK,
and also has its own manufacturing
unit in China, producing outwear
and swimwear for the global market.
Though CWI was established in 2013
in Leeds (UK), most of the companies
in the group are very old, some as
old as 20 years. These are companies
which are acquired by Zhen Sun,
so growth for CWI is quite organic.
Amit Kumar, Country Head (India
Operations), CWI who is a sourcing
expert and has earlier worked with
top global brands, shared about
the company’s strategy and future
plans regarding sourcing and overall
business which is quite impressive.
Given below is an excerpt from a long
discussion with Amit.
Being strongly in
UK and Brexit
On Brexit, we are as confused as
the House of Commons is. Its impact
Amit Kumar, Country Head (India Operations), CWI
because of increasing social
media awareness globally…;
unfortunately but true that kids
today spend a lot of time online or
watching TV. So get in love with
characters they watch online and
love to have clothes and other items
associated to these characters.
We have recently started our own
Instagram page for Dennicci and
have also enrolled with some big
influencers in the UK to propel our
growth. Once this works out to our
expectation, we are planning to
expand this to our other companies
and also use some more social
media tools.
Challenges and solutions
ESSENTIALS
• Apart from
sourcing
from India,
the company
is exploring
multidimensional
opportunities,
be it license
business or
supplying its
Chinese factory’s
product to
Indian retailers
and much more.
• Major sourcing
of the company
is mainly from
China and India
(as CWI is a
design loaded
company).
really is that buying overall is
quite conservative as no one really
knows how the final deal between
the UK and EU will turn out to
be. So everyone is playing safe to
wait and watch and buy only what
is necessary; we thankfully have
seen a positive growth in most of
the companies last year and are
projecting growth this year also,
mostly because a big junk of our
business is licensed.
Strengths
Our USP is great designs as we
have a strong team of close to
100 designers across the group
between the UK and China.
Apart from strong supply chain
partnership, having a local team at
the place of production does help us
to achieve our targets. The fabrics
we use differentiate us from others.
Licenses business is our other
strength as we have 52 licenses
between all our companies. This
segment has benefited the most
22 Apparel Online India | MAY 1-15, 2019 | www.apparelresources.com
The challenges are no different
from other companies like ours
which are to reduce cost and
have higher expectations from
customers every season, as all
retailers are trying to overdo each
other in terms of quality, design
and price. As we are a very heavily
design loaded company, we have a
slight edge over our competitors;
we provide the design as landed
shipments to most of our customers,
and are expecting a growth of
conservative 10% year-on-year for
next two years.
All about India
Some of our companies when under
original ownership have been
sourcing from India for more than a
decade and were mainly using local
agents in India. CWI operations
in India started only in 2017 with
some local QA on the ground and
with majority of the operations
being directly managed by UK
team. Looking at the growth and