Camessi Produces 2500 Bespoke Shirts Per Month!

Mr Sanjiv Shroff, Director, Camessi in an interview with BW BusinessWorld talks about the bespoke clothing industry and how his company has been expanding in bespoke clothing. Camessi further explained by him has been meeting orders of 2500 shirts a month and have a turnover of Rupees 5 crore a month.

What was the idea behind launching Camessi and specializing in bespoke clothing?

The company was officially set up in 2006 and we have been in the textile business for over 60 years now. We found the need for bespoke clothing in India and we set up this factory. Initially, we began to analyze the manufacturing, trading and the workflow of the business because the products we wanted to introduce were high end. We then put up a factory next to a textile mill which is a publically listed company and is 40 years old and also installed state of the art machines imported from Germany. The challenge for us was to train people to produce these shirts. Hence we took girls from neighboring villages who were relatives of our mill workers and started training them from scratch which took around 8-10 months per person resulting into 2 years of reaching the quality level to produce the products. Camessi as a brand was officially launched in 2009 and since then we have been producing shirts. Back then we were the only and first bespoke manufacturers of shirts in India. In the year 2015, we also entered the handmade trouser market.

How do you manufacture these shirts? What is the procedure you follow in customizing and meeting requirements of different clients?

We start with the measurements for making bespoke shirts. Our pattern is different and we go from scratch and once that it is created we make a trial/fitting shirt for the customer which is made out of ordinary fabric. Once those trial shirts meet the measurements of the customer, the customer can then select the style, collars, color, cuffs and buttons for the kind of shirt they want. After the measurement and customization process, the shirts are then manufactured and given to the customer which also compliments our idea of each shirt as a bespoke shirt that we make. Prior to the trial shirt phase, we have our own bespoke consultants who go to each customer and try to understand the requirements as per the customer’s lifestyle, fitting, style and fabric. We have around 2000 fabrics in stock which help us provide a lot of varieties to our clients at any given time. This entire procedure is an authentic way of tailoring which started off 200 years ago and we use lean manufacturing from Toyota, Sigma processes to ensure the quality and productivity of the shirt where each of them are checked in about 87 places. We produce around 2500 shirts a month with the same quality and all undergo one bespoke method which we strictly follow.

What was the kind of investment made in setting up the plant? Where has the machinery been outsourced from?

The investment at that time for setting up the plant and machinery was Rs.5 crore. The land on which the vicinity was set up already belonged to us, hence our main expenditure included the setting up of the factory and getting the right kind of machinery to provide high-quality clothing. We had also invested a lot in training our employees and we wanted to make sure we appoint workers from nearby villages and empower the girls and women in a highly male-dominated area. The investment for training the employees for the first 3-4 years also went up in single digits in crores. This total investment today has helped us in achieving a total turnover would be around Rs.4.5 to 5 crores per annum.

What are the varieties in fabrics Camessi provides to the clients? Do you have your own stock as well?

We keep sourcing fabrics from different other parts of the world and we have never taken any fabric from the customer to make shirts. We, in fact, store all the fabric and we have a wide variety from which the customers can choose as well. The fabrics include varieties of cotton, linen and silk but to add to it all we also have blends of fabrics too which ensures that the customer yet has an array of materials to select from.

Where do you see Camessi in the next 5 years?

This business has originated basically out of a passion for producing good quality clothing and customized according to our client’s preferences. We didn’t want to overemphasize on mass media and communication including expensive advertisements because ultimately if we advertise we must have a presence of a store and the main issue for a store is our services which are very personalized. Very honestly in today’s market, the cost of setting up outlets is quite high and even though we are not short of orders we don’t want to invest our profits into unnecessary costs (according to us) that we don’t need. After evaluating the pros and cons we concluded that a store at this point in time was really not essential.

Although in the long run, we do have plans to expand our services and open outlets and more importantly spread the brand name. But in the short term, we are a company that wants to be self-sufficient in funds. Most of our competitors fail to match the quality we provide in bespoke clothing. We further want to diversify as a men’s wear brand and we have plans on the horizon to develop the men’s wear brand.