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: Mrs Shobha Kapoor had looked appallingly at the tea set that she received as a gift from her office on retirement. It had two pairs of porcelain cups with stainless steel saucers. That was way back in 2002. The steel had a very different matt finish that one was unused to seeing those days. And since it was steel and utterly down market, she promptly took the crockery to the retailer––the tag had been thoughtfully left on the packing––and had it exchanged for an outrageously priced crystal bowl!
Six years on, she would not be tempted to make the same mistake. Knowing that a Magppie stainless steel crockery set can cost anything upwards of Rs 10,000, she would proudly display it as a specimen of art, probably on the kitchen sideboard.
That’s how much stainless steel has moved up in market- and mindshare over a short span of six years in India. “Our domestic sales in 2000 were near to none. Today, we have crossed Rs 25 crore in sales,” says Vinod Jain, director of Magppie International, a Sonepat-based outfit that exports to 20 countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and Australia. “Internationally, we do business worth Rs 75 crore, which is projected to cross Rs 120 crore this financial year.”
An offshoot of a 30-year-old family-run business, Jain diversified from rolling stainless steel sheets to rolling shapes with his battery of young designers hired from NID and NIFT in India and hi-end design houses in Italy and France. In 1998, a full design studio was set up by the company, with an investment of Rs 30 lakh and the products that rolled out from this studio got such rave reviews at Ambitec-Frankfurt exhibition in 1999, that Jain knew he was on to something big. It was in 2000 that the company decided to export its steel artefacts, four years before the Magppie brand was formally launched and two years before its products hit the shop shelves in India.
Jain figured that steel with its neutral hues and clear lines doesn’t quite hold the same charm for Indian consumers, as it does in the West. He set up the India retail stores in 2002 amid great trepidation. “We wanted to come down to the market level first and then attempt to move up from there,” recalls Jain. Hence the late effort at branding. It’s still a little mystifying that although...
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