India's Pottery Enterprises Draw Entire Families From Cities To Villages

In this series, Sramana Mitra shares chapters from her book Vision India 2020, that outlines 45 interesting ideas for start-up companies with the potential to become billion-dollar enterprises. These articles are written as business fiction, as if we’re in 2020, reflecting back on building these businesses over the previous decade. We hope to spark ideas for building successful start-ups of your own.

Even during the early success of Deepti, I could see that the project would not scale to move more than a couple million people out of the cities. I needed more projects like it, and I came up with Gagori as a second, focusing on relocation of entire families from city to village.

Depressing statistics were coming in from the slums at a fantastic pace. Even a relatively smaller city like Lucknow – let alone Mumbai, Kolkata, or Delhi – had 750 slums in 2009. The scale of the problem was absolutely staggering, as were the results – crime, alcoholism, drugs, skyrocketing rates of mental illness, even suicide. And with such unbridled urban expansion, it was easy to project a pressure-cooker future for India’s already horrendously congested infrastructure.

In 2009, a Wall Street Journal article forecasted Mumbai’s population to cross 20 million in 2010, and 26 million in 2025. Delhi would cross 20 million in 2020, and Kolkata in 2025. Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Ludhiana, Patna, and another ten mega-cities were each bursting at their seams with overflowing traffic, substandard sewage infrastructure, and a thick cloud of doomsday-esque carbon dioxide.

In Humanity’s Environmental Future: Making Sense in a Troubled World, author William Ross McCluney posed the question: How many people can the earth really support? McCluney’s answer: between 500 million and one billion, at a reasonable standard of living. Ecologist and agronomist David Pimentel of Cornell University found similar numbers. By hypothetically extending the 2008 average standard of living of US citizens to all people in the world, his research showed that the earth’s carrying capacity is inadequate to support a world population of over one to two billion people.

So there I was, sitting with a computer, a spreadsheet, some market research, and an anxious intellect. The problem we faced: we needed to move at least four billion people to another planet. Or, without such a second planetary option, we needed to redistribute the population over the land we had, and in so much reimagine the possibilities of now underutilized ground.

Gagori followed much of the same principles of Deepti. We acquired large tracts of land – tens of acres – and built 1,500-person communities, and by 2020, we had 1,500 of them laboring away far, far from the cities. In picturesque settings, our former slum- dwelling inhabitants spent their days working on pottery wheels, solar-powered kilns, and such, building beautiful platters, bowls, tea sets, and vases.

Gagori, of course, had a significant design element to it, for which I wrestled briefly with Indian designers, but I was unable to get the level of simplicity I sought. Consequently, I resigned to using Japanese and Italian designers alongside Indian ones, slowly shaping their tastes and instincts. This was a very important decision since a substantial export business was crucial to making the Gagori numbers interesting. We had to cater to Western taste, and that palette would not accept designs as complex as what the Indian designers kept bringing to the table.

For the domestic market, we accessed another important lever: Palanquin stores were perfect outlets for Gagori products. The two brands complemented each other, deftly balancing Gagori platters on Palanquin dining tables, catering to the same core audience. We were able to sell $200 million worth of Gagori merchandise through the Palanquin stores in 2015.

The export business, as I envisioned, was twice that size, although our projections show a 50:50 pairing by 2025.

Gagori, as a brand, has developed tremendous international appeal. In this case, we have not only been able to differentiate with pricing, delivering the absolute highest quality pottery at 25% of the price of Western comparables, but we’ve also set ourselves apart at a purely product level. In fact, we did not tell the slum rehabilitation story at all in building this brand. Since Gagori’s products had much higher differentiation potential based on design and pricing, we felt no need to play the additional card of the rehabilitation story, which commodity products like candles needed more acutely.

An early deal with Design Within Reach gave us huge leverage on this front. DWR carries for the most part, Scandinavian, Japanese, and Italian designers. Our late- blooming Indian designers found their vases among the legends – the Eameses, the Mendinis, the Castiglionis, and the Wegners, which then led us to other major retail partnerships with Williams-Sonoma and eventually Target, each of which became huge channels. Of course, for Target, we developed a separate line under a new brand, Gargi, without diluting the brand equity in the high-end line.

In fact, we returned the early favor to Palanquin by introducing them to all three retailers, and they too were able to leverage the relationships and access substantial additional revenues. Deepti, as well, found prime additional channels for its candles.

As I look back on Gagori’s last decade, two things make me very proud. One, predictably, is the fact that we have moved another two million slum dwellers out of the Indian cities such that they live today in clean, decent housing, their children watching as their hands maneuver lumps of moist clay on pottery wheels. The second, I must admit, is my sheer delight at the quality of design and finish we have achieved in the Gagori products. The India Inc. brand, once characterized by cheap, low-quality, poorly- designed products, now, once and for all, has shed that humiliating stigma.

Photo credit: nevil zaveri /Flickr.com.