Punjabi Heritage to retail the brand pan India

Though last winter Punjabi Heritage, the brand from B D S Enterprises did not experience positive winter business in jackets and sweaters, the sweat shirt market was good. Commenting on the expectations from this season,

Arashdeep Singh Baweja, Director says, “We are not very optimistic about this winter though we have good orders. That is because we are not very sure about repeat orders.”

However, the brand has its plans in place for product and retail expansion. As Baweja says, “We have launched sleeveless jackets with Tafta fabric. It is in two styles, basic and reversible. By January, we will have track suits and lowers for women in sinker fabrics. In Punjabi Heritage, we only had round necks earlier, now we have introduced collar T-shirts. We are coming up with stripers in Punjabi tees apart from experimenting with textile kurtas. For summer ’13 we are playing on mix and match fabrics. We will cut and sew stripers from different lots. It was a big hit even last year.”

On the retail front, the brand’s collections are available in six EBOs “We will open EBOs where NRIs gather. One will be in Haveli, Amritsar, and another on the Delhi-Haryana highway. By February, we will have two or three more EBOs. We are in about 200 MBOs like Biglife Ritu Wears and C&M. We cover the whole of the north and Northeast. We are also present in Gujarat and have a few tie-ups in the south like Bangalore and Hyderabad. We are in Mumbai with Punjabi T-shirts. By summer, we will add 50 to 75 MBOs and want to cover the rest of Maharashtra and the south,” Baweja elaborates.

“Punjabi Heritage was launched just by chance,” Baweja says, adding, “We had a shop in Mall Road, Ludhiana where NRIs visiting Ludhiana used to come asking for T-shirts with their names printed on it. Gradually, they started asking for T-shirts with Punjabi language, its culture and heritage on them. This is when we launched with Punjabi writing on them T-shirts. We got repeat orders for them and thus the idea was well accepted and we started making T-shirts under the brand name Punjabi Heritage.”

About 70 per cent of the company’s business comes from winter and 30 per cent from summer. “Spending is more in winter because that’s where marriages and the festivals happen are and in winter unit prices are higher,” Baweja sums up.