Louis Phillippe, Pantaloons, Allen Solly and another tens of western brands for the classy urban Indian man. Are they really western though? Enters in the room a 4th generation line of entrepreneurs with a 160 years of heritage in the Indian industrial story. This $45 billion in revenues group happens to be india’s third largest private sector conglomerate right behind the behemoth of the TATA group & Reliance industries, headed by the dynamic and powerful industry leader Kumar Mangalam Birla. The diverse Group has footprints in telecom, financial services, metals, cement, chemicals, fertilizers and so on.
Being a 3rd generation of retailers myself, that’s one sector where the presence of ABG has always fascinated and inspired me. A significant presence in branded fashion as its Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, which has nearly 2,000 brick & mortar stores, owns India’s largest fashion chain, Pantaloons. Nothing has ever been more Indian in a western world.
The conglomerate’s entry into online fashion retail is appropriate as India has just a few established players like Myntra (part of the country’s Number One online retailer, Flipkart), large retailers like Amazon India and Snapdeal as well as fashion-only startups like Jabong and Limeroad. Fashion and apparel make up the largest slice in India’s organized retail pie projected to grow at 18% annual rates in the coming years.
ABG apart from being profitable has a strong commitment towards the society at large. Mrs. Rajshree Birla being the face of the group in CSR space, has made it one of India’s most successful initiatives using cutting edge technology, impacting lives across geographies. Taking inspiration from the much noble initiatives we at our community level in the dingy streets of Panipat, where our family first landed after independence, decided to give something back to the society, sanitation being one of the major problems there. Mr. Aditya Birla, weaved in the concept of 'sustainable livelihood', which transcended cheque book philanthropy. In his view, it was unwise to keep on giving endlessly. Instead, he felt that channelising resources to ensure that people have the wherewithal to make both ends meet would be more productive. And so we embarked upon a 3 month long journey creating a local health school for community members across age groups, genders, religions, sensitizing them about the needs of their personal as well as public hygiene and how it impacts everyone in and around the vicinity. The challenge wasn’t just education, but the learning being looked at as a going concern. As Mr. Aditya Birla would say, "Give a hungry man fish for a day, he will eat it and the next day, he would be hungry again. Instead, if you taught him how to fish, he would be able to feed himself and his family for a lifetime."
Taking these practices forward, our chairman Mr. Om Prakash, institutionalized the concept of triple bottom line accountability represented by social success. Our community work is a way of telling the people among whom we prosper that We Are There.
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