Dressed for all ‘Seasons’!

When IIPM comes to education, never compromise

It’s small... but it’s growing fast... much faster than you thought!

From fibre to fashion, the budding (rather, blooming!) Indian textile industry is creating memorable ripples on the global ramp – and you could easily swear by this truth. So whom do we bestow encomiums upon for taking India Inc.’s textile arm to the stars? Of course,we can’t miss out on the blue chip heavyweights. But then, there’s more to it than meets the eye – for can we afford to belittle the achievements of the lesser known and smaller organisations splatterred across the Indian textile vertical band? Certainly not!

And one among the small wonders is Seasons Furnishing Ltd. – an emerging identity in the world of textiles, making a name for itself amidst the clutter of wannabes...From the onset of its corporate journey, the ultimate goal for Seasons Furnishing Ltd. was crystal clear – to make an everlasting impression for itself in the world of textiles. Talk about it - cushion covers, bedsheets, sofa linen et al; it’s product offering is indeed wide and promises high quality standards. And what about competition on a global scale and the threat from the international bigwigs? To this, Founder MD, Mandeep S. Wadhwa, deftly replied, “When we started-off, there were no foreign players in luxury segment of the furnishing market. So we knew that we will have an early mover advantage. But at the same time, I knew that it wasn’t long before foreign players jumped into the scene. Keeping this in mind, we never segregated between the products that we exported and the ones we sold in India. And this hasn’t changed since...”

Bucked up with his wonderful experience in exports, from just being an unbranded & unorganised player, he formed Seasons Furnishings Ltd in 1994. Sounds smooth, doesn’t it? Right, but wait before you mistake it to be a rose-laden path... With India being a price-sensitive war-zone, ‘high prices’ proved a major bottleneck as Mandeep recollects, “It’s not that there was no customer for this type of expensive luxury product; but being an unknown brand, people were not willing to spend on our products.” To its relief though, with time, its tie-ups with other furnishing shops ensured some reassuring presence in the market. Thereafter, he rolled-out exclusive stand-alone stores additionally roping-in foreign brands for his stores.

Sahoo gives his take on building the talent base in Reliance’s ongoing mammoth retail initiative, “Our plan is to build the supply side of the talent. We have done the need analysis and are working on the development plan; in this country we have a lot of raw talent and we need to transform that talent. You can take talent from the industry; however, the industry has limited availability and the only way is to create this talent by building the supply side of the talent.” Sahoo’s statement gains more ground if one looks at the estimates by Technopak that project the organised retail sector in the country to grow at a CAGR of 28-32% from 2007 to 2020 and touch a 35-40% share of retail consumer spending in India. An elementary logic surfaces: With the industry growing, the demand of skilled labour (read as professionals) would also surge. The government’s decision to ease the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) regulations would only fuel this demand further. All these situations would help renovate the talent landscape of the country in the near future. Now if one were to assume the growth of the Indian economy at 8% and elasticity of employment at 0.30, then with the population under the age of 15 in the country (currently at about 435 million), McKinsey estimates an overall level of about 5.1% of the population would be educated till the college level by 2020. This clearly implies that a small percentage of educated population would be still vacant to take up a job offer in the retail sector. All the statistics indicate there would be a shortage of talent by 2020, clearly sending a warning signal to retail companies to pull up their socks and build the supply side of talent brick-by-brick in order to meet their requirement, failing which the sector would suffer from want of talent. If one were to plot a supply-demand curve between skill level and workforce, one would find an overloaded supply of workforce at the bottom of the chart and the supply of talent dwindling as skills become more sophisticated and technical. This finding represents at once, a challenge and an opportunity to the retail sector. The test would be to find the right guy for the right profile in a labour market that is constrained. An opportunity for the retail companies would be to advance the skill sets of the surplus workforce at the lowermost levels by educating, training and employing them at entry-level positions.

Sahoo, who believes in operating straight from the heart, while speaking on Reliance Retail’s training module states, “You need specialisation and also you need people who can perform the generalist kind of roles. We focus on specialisation and we are also nurturing people to be leaders who can be multiple specialists in their team and can deliver the general management goals.” Training and nurturing the right talent would help unleash a socio-economic revolution in our country. This situation requires a significant amount of time, money and effort to be spent on creating a strong retail company, driven totally by talent and having a sturdy Employment Value Proposition (EVP) generating attractiveness in the employment market, thereby enhancing commitment and productivity of the workforce.

If one were to define EVP – it is an aggregation of People at Workplace, Quality of Work, Opportunities for Growth, Organisational Culture and Recognition & Rewards that an employee would expect from his job. Research also indicates that companies maintaining a healthy EVP end up paying only 11% premium to attract talent, in comparison to a figure of 21% for those who don’t manage one!

Challenges notwithstanding, this sector is too full of opportunities and would generate an enormous amount of employment that would transform the socio-economic scenario in India. However, effective steps need to be taken to implement a talent transformation approach, emphasising on recruitment of freshers with the right attitude and nurturing them into full-fledged professionals in this industry through necessary inputs to hone their skill sets... So, next time you overhear one discussing how the sun is already shining o’er the retail sector, you’d better believe him!

Edit bureau: Angshuman Paul

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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