Report

Traceability all the way to the cotton farm remains a challenge. Yet, cotton is a critical raw material for the garment and footwear sector and its cultivation may involve negative human rights impacts. In this context, how should brands implement due diligence when it comes to cotton? Can sustainability standards play a role? The second in a series.

Cotton cultivation takes place in a rural context and the agricultural sector is quite remote from the realities of the fashion industry and on which brands often feel that they have limited influence. The cotton value chain is a long and complex one. How can one ensure that due diligence regulations will not inadvertently exclude smallholder cotton farmers from global value chains? The first in a series.

The more than three decades old footwear major, Liberty, is re-engineering its DNA to catch up with the globally-hyped young India. This is coming at a modest cost of ₹50 crore annually, even as the company clocked ₹350 crore in the last fiscal, closing at ₹500crore+ in 2013-14 and now stepping up ops to meet the targeted ₹600 crore this year. Another feather in its cap in the April 2013-February 2014 span included manufacture of more than a crore pairs of footwear. “Last year, it was 82 lakh...

Puffing on a cigar in his study, Sherlock Holmes once makes a passing comment to Dr John Watson stating that the most intriguing crime is the one that is the most commonplace. The point here is not about crimes. It is about how we tend to miss the most obvious, the most commonplace. The Holmesian logic and perception can very well be applied to the Indian retail scenario. We all know that the Indian retail market is growing by leap and bounds. It is so obvious. Now. What is just as obvious is...

Fashion sells. Does it? The exercise leading up to the first ever IMAGES Retail Awards (IRA) gave us enough pointers that the business of beauty and fashion is blooming. Fashion it was that fashioned the retail trail as it leapfrogged to various other segments such as entertainment, consumer electronics, leisure, catering services. The pioneers in the organised field were Zodiac, Raymonds, Bata, Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri or the very up-market stores in plush five-star hotels like Gazdar in...

Has fashion apparel become unfashionable? Is being fashionable a part of the comman Indian’s psyche? Why are there no fashion seasons in India? Why are fashion retailers a harried lot? Why has the average spending curve on apparel seen a downward trend? How good are our shop floor personnel? Are we doing enough to get the best out of them and ourselves as retailers? Remember Images Fashion Forum ’04 (IFF ’04) where industry articulated the need to work together as “one”... where industry voiced...