The Indian kidswear company bringing international brands home and other top stories of the week
From luxury kidswear to an HR software helping SMEs of India, here are the top SMB stories of the week.
Fashion has no age. In fact, in the modern world, children too have opinions on what to and what not to wear.
Finding a gap in the kidswear market, where there was a dearth of international premium brands, Swati Saraf started in Delhi in 2011. While the growth was slow in the beginning, Swati says that the company is all geared up for expansion in both the online and the offline space. Here’s her story.
Les Petits
In the early 2000s when foreign brands were making their way to India, Swati Saraf noticed that most of them catered to adults and there were hardly any children-focussed brands.
This gap led Swati, who loves branded apparel, to start Delhi-based Les Petits. “The inspiration was my niece, for whom we used to get clothes from abroad. There was no good brand available in India and I realised that many people like us, who enjoy shopping for international branded wear, would be struggling too. The luxury kidswear market was not even open in India and was a risk, but we went ahead,” says Swati in an interaction with SMBStory.
Swati, after thorough market research, was able to bag the distributorship of Fendi in India, followed by D&G. She opened her first store in DLF Emporio, New Delhi, in 2011. The beginning of her business journey may have been slow, but Swati says Les Petits has grown by leaps and bounds.
Today Les Petits enjoys exclusive distributorship of Nuna besides showcasing 24 other brands, including Givenchy, Versace, Paul Smith Junior, Kenzo, and Stella McCartney.
Other top picks of the week
greytHR
The human resources (HR) department is responsible for everything that revolves around the employee life cycle in an organisation.
If we look at the Indian business landscape 20 years ago, small and medium businesses (SMBs) did not find much use from HR tools. The reason may vary—from absence of absolute solutions to low adoption of technology. However, if we look at the work culture today, HR automation is not a mere requirement, but it is a necessity to manage business operations efficiently.
The Indian HR technology market reached a value of $850 million in 2021 and is expected to reach $1,510 million by 2027, at a CAGR of 9.9% during 2022-2027.
Envisioning the growth of the sector, Girish Rowjee, along with his co-founder Sayeed Anjum, started Greytip in 1994 as a premier HR and payroll solutions provider to help large enterprises. However, it didn’t take long for them to pivot their business and cater to the SMB segment.
“In the 90s, when the internet started to become more prevalent and companies were opening up to adopt tech solutions, there were many businesses in India that were developing software solutions. However, their prime focus was to cater to international markets since they were more adaptive. Serving SMBs was not anyone’s focus and this is where we stepped in with our companies’ flagship technology platform, ,” says Girish.
Girish, an engineer by profession, says that SMBs need tools and solutions to solve their needs.
“The SMB market is fragmented, but they form the backbone of the economy, and hence we diverted our focus from large enterprises to small and medium businesses in India and are doing so for more than 25 years,” he says.
In a conversation with SMBStory, Girish details how greytHR is assisting small businesses across Tier I, II, and III locations across the country to adopt tech solutions.
Unified Communication for SMBs
Inflation is one of those necessary evils we need for economic growth. It is a cyclical phenomenon that rises and falls with a shift in economic conditions.
In the last year, we have seen inflation rise steadily month on month, and the impact is evident across several industries. There has been a sharp increase in prices as it has affected the automobile, real estate, and technology sectors.
Compared to September 2021, the consumer price index in September 2022 has risen by 8.2%.
It is tougher for businesses to cope with the rise in minimum support prices (MSPs) without leveraging the price point of their services. But how can SMBs enable significant cost savings when it comes to communication?
The solution is unified communications. With unified communication solutions, SMBs can integrate multiple software into a single platform, which makes it possible for them to reduce expenses and increase overall efficiency. Applications across business functions can converge into a single effective platform for text, voice, and video communications, available from anywhere, using any device.
Edited by Swetha Kannan
