Apparel Online India Magazine May 1-15, 2019 | Page 9

MIND TREE Shirish Srivastava, Head Sourcing – Apparel, Puma, Bangalore Try and become the master of one product! There is an advantage in this. It is not always necessary to do all products in one factory. You can be a master of one product and be very good at it. For example, there is a factory in Portugal which has a tie-up with Porsche. They do Porsche-designed products. They are so good at it that we don’t mind paying anything to them. Then there is M&S which excels in seamless, and hence price becomes secondary. So there is a choice to be made – either we become too good at a craft to pick it up as we know there will be demand for it, or we become a multi- demand factory wherein the game is to pay on the basis of efficiencies. This is a difficult game for India because we have not been known to drive that kind of efficiency. There are a lot of categories in which we can become really good and then it is no longer about the efficiencies as it becomes the niche that you create for your own manufacturing set-up. The trend reverses and brands follow those factories. Tanuja Sinha Roy, South Asia Head, JCPenney, New Delhi There is a need for more partnerships, and of course, with the core being fashion, it is much easier for a retailer to plan production NEXT MINDTREE QUESTION Placement of students from National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), one of India’s premier institutes, is going on. Are you hiring NIFTians? If yes, for which particular department and why? Have you noticed any change in recent years as far as placement in NIFT is concerned with regard to the quality, attitude, preferences of NIFTians? Would you like to suggest anything along these lines so that NIFT, NIFTians and the industry can be benefited in future?   or give projection, if you have multi-categories experience with your partners. So if your factory is much more agile to the needs, then you can be better partners given that you can do multi-categories, not knowing where the demands are going to come from because customers are changing frequently and are using diverse means to shop. Hence, multi-product manufacturing is preferred nowadays as flexibility is what dominates the market scenario at present. POST YOUR COMMENTS www.apparelresources.com [email protected] www.apparelresources.com | MAY 1-15, 2019 | Apparel Online India 9