I-Attire has now raised a debt funding of Rs 100 crore — divided into four quarters of Rs 30 crore each, of which the first round came in January — and launched an aggressive expansion spree. In 2011, a company founded by three friends began to manufacture corporate uniforms, a largely unorganised sector at the time. Today, Pune-based I-Attire is valued at Rs 55 crore and makes customised shirts, industrial uniforms, promotional bags and T-shirts and corporate merchandise, besides corporate uniforms, for companies that include Fortune 500 names.
I-Attire has now raised a debt funding of Rs 100 crore — divided into four quarters of Rs 30 crore each, of which the first round came in January — and launched an aggressive expansion spree. Coming up in June is a factory in Kesnand, near Wagholi, which will be fully automated to increase production.
“We intend to split the business so that 60 per cent will cater to the core corporate uniform business and 40 per cent will be retail, where we want to start working for some brand. We have started the latter project already by exporting to some foreign clients and attending international trade fairs,” says Ashish Sahay, one of the founders.
The company has been associated with Mafatlal Industries since 2014 and is now also working on relaunching a major Mumbai-based textile brand across India.
Housed in the same factory space, however, will be offices of FluffyDates, a platform where pets can find the right partner and services ranging from creche and food to vets and ambulances.
The company has been associated with Mafatlal Industries since 2014 and is now also working on relaunching a major Mumbai-based textile brand across India. “As a company, we have believed in diversification. There is a Rs 5 trillion bandwidth of business we can expect out of India in the next five years in the pet care sector. FluffyDates will be a full-fledged enterprise whose core line is that a lot of people have pets as the nuclear family concept has become entrenched in society and lifestyles have changed. A lot of young people are moving to different cities, living by themselves and keeping pets. There is a huge gap of 60 per cent in this market at present,” says Sahay, adding that he intends to put FluffyDates up for valuation by the end of 2022.
While FluffyDates will centre around an application that will be a mating site for pets and offer services such as ambulance and boarding, I-Attire’s focus will remain the apparel business as “companies are becoming increasingly brand conscious”. During the pandemic, though, they had also begun to manufacture PPEs and face masks to distribute to hospitals and traffic cops, among others, free. Eventually, they bagged an order for Rs 22 crore from an airline to make PPEs for middle-seat passengers and crew.
“The uniform business was doing very well from the time we started manufacturing to the year the pandemic entered the world in 2020. In 2021, it picked up and, in 2022, the scale of the business has doubled because everybody has got back to work. We had bought land for the factory in 2021 but, despite the delay in setting up the latter, this year will see fresh growth thanks to the fully-automated machine set-up,” adds Sahay.
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