• Opportunities

Ranjiv Ramchandani and Vimal Mariwala’s favorite haunts are Leopold’s café and other unpretentious watering holes in Mumbai. For those in the know, it might be difficult to imagine owners of India’s biggest T-shirt brand being regulars at such places. Then again, if you took a closer look at their products, it might seem quite natural for them to be there, after all.

Whacky, off-beat and humorous is what inspires the duo. Scenes from everyday life inspire them more. In fact, their success lies in their ability to see humor in the mundane, and in the formula they’ve mastered to market India to the western audience—all on a T-shirt. Having prospered through their completely irreverent brand of humor, they plan to continue on this tried and tested path
of success.

Between Mariwala (r. above), who handles production and marketing, and Ramchandani (l. above), who is the founder and heads the creative division, this relaxed and unassuming duo churns out the most renowned of Indian T-shirt brands: Tantra. The brand, indeed, is bigger than the business, enjoying an immediate reckoning with students and tourists.

The beginning of this great journey was a rather humble one, though. Ramchandani worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency in Mumbai. However, for him, visuals came before words; moreover, the job did not provide the scope for owning the product. Tired of the limitations in the field, Ramchandani finally struck out in 1997 with a band of three friends to set up Tantra. They started with stationery, but soon made the transition to T-shirts.

“To create a brand, you’ve got to be saying something along with the visuals. In addition, we wanted to represent the real India to foreign tourists who have no clue about the country’s varied culture. We wanted to use their language and their humor to do it. A souvenir T-shirt fit the bill. It was also something that was basic and comfortable and quintessential,” reasons Ramchandani.

Ramchandani convinced a friend’s father to stock his products at his store in Colaba. This prime area of Mumbai is a hub for tourists, students and regular shoppers, a veritable boiling pot of cultures and age groups—just the right mix of target customers. The response was encouraging, to say the least, and there was no looking back since then. But it was only after the country was struck by the retail boom that the guys at Tantra could reach out to customers across the country and enjoy the freedom to choose a variety of colors for their products.

In 2005–2006, when the big retailers had finally spread their networks across the country, Tantra’s sales zoomed. Shelf displays helped in offering more choices to the customer in terms of color, size and creatives, providing a readymade platform for the visibility of the products.

Currently, with three different labels—Tantra, Barking Dog and Line Maro—the company garners sales of 100,000 tees in a month, on an average. The price range varies between Rs. 195 for kids’ T-shirts to Rs. 695 for unisex zipper fleece jackets, a new range that has been introduced to address seasonal market needs in the north and north-east.

Experiments are on with newer, longer and lycra fits for women. The growth has been good, and the brand famous, but the company has so far opened only 14 owned stores with plans to open another three this calendar year. The reason behind this conservative growth, says Mariwala, is the fact that the company did not want make to the mistake of having too many properties and dilute the profits in paying high rentals.

“People make the mistake of ramping up right at the beginning of a venture and shelling out 30 to 40 percent of turnover in rentals. This does not provide for a buffer in case the business does not take off immediately or if the markets are down,” he points out.

Tantra has always been self-funded, and this will remain the blueprint for the future as well, asserts Mariwala. Over the last 6 to 7 years, the growth in business has been in double-digit percentage points. However, growth lies in the tier II & tier III towns and in cities, since these have a sizable student population. In fact, the ratio of sales to tourists and indigenous markets reversed from 90:10 to 30:70 percent in the years that the products have been around.

The going has not always been smooth, owing mainly to Tantra’s brand of humor. Once, it didn’t go down well with a visiting Pakistani delegation; another time, a plagiarizing local brand in Gujarat got the company into trouble, as any T-shirt with Indian motifs or smart lines are automatically associated with Tantra. Plans are on to diversify into products that would help the brand move up the value chain, while also retaining the creativity that marks the Tantra range.

©Entrepreneur December 2009

Tags:
Ranjiv Ramchandani, t-shirt, Tantra, Vimal Mariwala