For those who have yearned to replicate the burnished brown wall mosaic look of Delhi?s Le Meridien Hotel in their homes, well, the opportunity is here. Sicis, the company that did it, has set up shop in Delhi. President Maurizio Leo Placuzzi, an entrepreneur who earlier exported furniture, was forced to come up with a mosaic line due to an order from Egypt that no one in Italy could make. That forced him to complete the order himself, and he?s never looked back. Today the just-over-two-decades-old company counts global celebrities as its clients for their homes as well as top projects such as the Burj al Arab, Dubai, for which 49,500 sq ft of mosaics have been used, besides the Palazzo Versace, Sydney and Mandarin Oriental Hotel, New York in its portfolio. Suman Tarafdar sat among a dazzling array of tiles, mirrors, bathtubs, lamps and more to unravel the journey to this entrepreneur to the top of his field.
Italy has had a long tradition of mosaic as art. Are you reviving the tradition?
Yes, we do mosaic as art, not as tiles. We give the client an opportunity to have an eternal painting. What has changed since we started is our global client base. Therefore, our offering today too has moved from classic to baroque to contemporary lines. We started with stone and marbles and are today also working on glass, stainless steel, gold and laser.
What has made your products so popular?
Our products speak for themselves. We produce everything inhouse?from raw material to finished products. Our offer is standardised, to the architect, designer or the customer. We have an extensive catalogue, but our clients are also free to modify. They often replace colours or patterns and we translate it for them at our factories in Ravenna. We translate any design, and in that sense are like an Italian tailor.
The response is excellent all over, and we are expanding globally. We have 17 exclsuive boutiques already. We just opened in Paris and are opening next year in Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai.
Given India?s own, less expensive mosaic industry, will there be enough takers for Sicis? comparatively expensive offerings?
India is a potentially rich market for us. Indians love decoration, and they want beautiful homes. We started exporting two years ago, and the positive response prompted us to set up this flagship store. This is good time to enter the market. Also we do not see any competition for us here. Sicis is looking at top-end residential properties as well as the hospitality and wellness sectors. We control all our production, and deliver in two weeks. This showroom will centralise distribution in India and support the marketing of Sicis collections for authorised dealers across the country.
We are here in JV with Chennai-based Degre7. In the next five years, we hope to have sales worth Euro 10 million. In India we expect the order sizes to be from Euro 50,000 to 6,00,000. The Meridien order of mosaic tesserae, or tiny pieces of mosaic, was for 7,500 sq ft and cost 5,00,000 euros.
