“The future of home textiles borders on sustainability”

GHCL Limited was incorporated on 14th of October 1983. The company has established itself as a well-diversified group with an ascertained footprint in chemicals, textiles and consumer products segment. The textiles division at GHCL is a vertically-integrated manufacturing facility with spinning, wide-width weaving, continuous fabric processing, and cut & sew facilities for manufacturing premium quality bed linen.

GHCL’s Spinning unit is located near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, where they manufacture multiple varieties of yarn ranging from 16s to 32s in open end, 30s to 120s in ring spun compact counts in 100 per cent cotton and 24s to 70s counts in blended yarns. GHCL’s home textiles manufacturing is located near Vapi in Gujarat. Here yarn is woven into fabric, which is then dyed, printed and finished into final products, like bed sheets, which is then exported worldwide.

Manu Kapur, President and CEO – Home Textiles of GHCL Limited, takes us through the journey of the company and how it has been progressing in product innovations.

The story of textiles at GHCL began with spinning, with the amalgamation of the sick Sri Meenakshi mills in the late 1990s. This business was successfully turned around in the early 2000s and in 2006 GHCL set up their integrated home furnishings facility in Vapi, Gujarat, for the manufacture of sheet sets.

What are the buyers expectations in home textiles today? How does your company meet these expectations? What kind of trends and trends are visible today and what do they portend for the future of home textiles?
For buyers today, appropriate pricing, timely availability of merchandise on store shelves, correct quality and production under compliant conditions are pre-requisites. In addition, sustainability in terms of raw material usage, production processes and the entire supply chain are now crucial trends that are emerging and are influencing buying decisions in a huge way. Traceability and innovation are other trends that are looming large on the horizon. The future of home textiles borders on sustainability, traceability and innovation. A heightened technological interface in products and processes is to be expected. The other huge trend is the online business, which is expected to gain tremendous traction in times to come.

What are the various set-ups in your company for production, innovation and marketing?
We have dedicated teams for production, product development and marketing.

If in export, what percentage of production goes into export? Where are the markets, old and newly emerging?
Over 90 per cent of what we produce goes into exports. The US is our main market, followed by Canada, Australia and the UK. Japan and the Middle East are emerging markets for us.

With the tremendous growth of home textiles, are we seeing competition intensifying in India in this market? How do you plan to keep ahead in this race?
We only contract manufacture for large format retailers in the Indian market and do not sell under our own brand offline. The intensification of competition hence, does not impact us.

– KARTHIK MUTHUVEERAN