Fabric is at core of this year’s Diva Shwal’s collection

It’s all about the fabric innovation and vibrant colours for Diva Shawls this winter season. During the exclusive interaction, Ashwani Kumar Sabharwal, Proprietor, Diva Shawls, reveals the future trends and more.

With close to three decades of collective experience, brand Diva took shape in the year 2006 and from then on, there’s no going back. The company manufactures shawls, stoles and fabrics for ladies and cut out suits. Giving insights into new launches for the upcoming winter season, Ashwani Kumar Sabharwal, Proprietor, Diva Shawls, informs, “We have invented many a new fabric this season. The fabrics are finer and lighter in weight. The colour palette is also quite different. For instance, we have mustard, turquoise, neon and orange shades. English colours are trendy this season while colours such as brown, black, purple and magenta are evergreen. In terms of fabrics, we use pure wool, wool-polyester combination and pure polyester in shawls. Stoles have been made of modal and viscose. This combination has been used for shawls also in a small scale. We have stoles in pure wool also. Pure wool products are expensive and preferred by high-income group while the product made of mix of fabrics attracts middle income strata.”

Strong network boosts business

Talking about market trends, Sabharwal says, “The market accepts everything as long as it is innovative. People are as open to embroidery as they are to prints but the only condition is it should be novel. And they are equally warm to jamawar and jacquards. We do all these categories and never face issues in terms of demand. We do hand-embroidery, moti work, etc, and it is really going good. So it’s all about inventiveness in your creation.”

Shawls are a unisex product and the company serves to men & women both the segments. The only differentiation between shawls for men and women is in colours and size, designs are always the same. The available size of shawls is 22’’88. The normal size for stoles also stands at about two meter, but the width is smaller. Shawls and stoles with fine counts are more popular nowadays. The kani shawls are in demand. These are fine counts shawls with prints. But, this doesn’t mean that that big counts are not preferred anymore. Shawls with big counts have a steady demand. Talking about the expansive range, he iterates, “Our sample set alone makes for about 300 designs this year. In one particular shawls category, we normally have 10 choices in fabrics and 15 different work. In terms of design, they are innumerable in kani shawl alone there are 200 designs,” he explains.

The company covers North, East and Central part of the country. And retail mostly through MBOs. Every year, they add around 50 stores. This year, they have already added about 30 stores and are planning to add another 20 by the year end.

As for the product mix, demand for both categories is almost the same with stoles having a little higher demand as they are preferred by youngsters due to their multi-usability and vast range of colours. They are comfortable, lighter and easy to carry product.

Sabharwal says competition does not bother him the only concern is unpredictable winters as unfavourable climate results in dip in sales. He says winter season used to be long in the past, now it’s getting shorter by the day. It affects business “but still we are doing good. This trend of business does not exist only in shawls category but the winter wear market as a whole is going down. We hope that the market will improve in the next couple of years,” he opines.

Highlighting future strategies, he concludes, “We want to add more products. The new addition will be an extension of existing product line. More fine counts and light weight are expected to be in.”