Design Excellence, Superior Supply Chain Management, and a Strong Brand
D’Decor Home Fabrics has established a leading position in the curtain and upholstery market in India after an interesting, challenging, and fascinating journey. Their success can be attributed to their uncompromising stance on product quality and the sheer variety of products offered.
Ajay Arora, Managing Director, D’Decor Home Fabrics
D’Decor Home Fabrics, the world’s largest manufacturer of woven fabric and upholstery, moves closer every day to its ultimate objective of beautifying homes on every street, in every city, in every country, in the world. With an exceptionally strong retail presence in India, the D’Decor brand boasts prominence across 400 cities, a vast network of multi-brand outlets with over 2,000 sales points, a growing number of D’Decor stores, as well as the establishment of a strong online presence through its thriving e-commerce platform and leading marketplaces. It offers a diverse line of products and services. This includes curtains, upholstery, bedding, blinds, wallpapers, rugs, and a whole range of home furnishing.
The brand has rightly earned a glowing reputation amongst its consumer base in terms of stellar product quality, convenience, and customer satisfaction. For instance, their initiative, Style Expert by D’Decor, allows the company to achieve the highest level of consumer satisfaction by helping the customers visualise their preferred interior designs and bring to life their vision through end-to-end execution of the home makeover. With technological development and innovation being a constant at D’Decor Home Fabrics, a variety of ingenious products are available to suit a plethora of consumer needs.
Manufacturing and Distribution
As a vertically integrated manufacturer, 97% of its manufacturing process is carried out in-house, from yarns to finished fabrics, to packed products.
D’Decor Home Fabrics owns three state-of-the-art manufacturing units which are vertically integrated and equipped with a wide variety of yarn processing, weaving, and fabric processing capabilities. The entire manufacturing system is diverse and complex and can manage 30k SKUs and 100k order lines per year. Managing this complexity in a manufacturing system comes from deploying cutting-edge information technology and a culture where customer satisfaction supersedes conventional manufacturing KPIs.
In addition to having a stellar manufacturing process, D’Decor Home Fabrics has a unique distribution model that has revolutionised the market by introducing an easier way for retailers to place their orders by the construction of India’s first robotic warehouse, such that they have the opportunity to order exactly the amount they require.
Simone Arora, Creative Director, D’Decor Home Fabrics
Upon receiving the order, the warehouse team cuts the exact quantity of fabric and packs and dispatches the product, all within 48 hours. The advantages of this game-changing model of distribution are innumerable, with the consumer being spoilt for choice and the retailer having lightning-fast access to whatever goods they specifically require, which astronomically boosts operational efficiency.
This unique process has significantly benefited retailers who were earlier forced to hold stock, which limited the consumers’ choice, leading to an array of financial inefficiency. Now, the retailers can display a wider range of collections via a catalogue, all quickly accessible to them based on the consumer’s needs. This process instilled in the business model has been a complete game changer in the industry, not only in the home textile but also in the overall textile industry.
D’Decor Home Fabrics has a booming export market that makes up 65% of their business – supplying to large retailers and fabric makers in over 65 countries. Domestically, the company supplies to the largest multi-brand outlets, large format stores, and leading marketplaces.
In early 2000, the home furnishing business was highly unorganised. D’Decor Home Fabrics has transformed the business into an organised segment by building a brand in 2010 and bringing in consumer confidence and trust. It launched a digital platform in 2016, giving access to 1000+ retailers who could now place orders, ask queries, and check stock availability at their fingertips and thereby manage the supply chain better.
Creating New Trends
Other manufacturers in the home furnishing space have remained manufacturers, whereas D’Decor Home Fabrics set up a whole distribution system which is a bridge between the factory and retailers for seamless flow of information and products. The journey undertaken by the company has led to its position as the leading brand in the curtain and upholstery business in India. This journey is marked by their uncompromising stance on product quality and the sheer variety of products offered. One of their biggest edges over their competitors is the strong emphasis they have laid on product design, which has taken on a contemporary, sophisticated, and minimalist yet suave nature over the years.
From the inception, the partnership of Ajay Arora and his wife, Simone, provided a unique combination of manufacturing and design excellence. Simone Arora has spearheaded design and brand functions to ensure the aesthetic sensibilities of the brand are international. Having pursued a fruitful partnership with European studios, along with working in consultation with international designers from the US, Italy, and the UK as well as possessing a strong design team of their own, D’Decor Home Fabrics has ensured that their products boast the best-in-class designs in the home furnishing category. Furthermore, the company invests a considerable amount of time in improving the variety of their product line by tirelessly working with new colours, design trends, substrates, weaves, and finishes. This has resulted in their customers having access to a rich and diverse product range with over 20,000 SKUs to choose from annually.
In the export market, D’Decor Home Fabrics has built partnerships with world-leading brands over the last decade in Europe, America, Japan, and Australia. The emphasis and focus on the developed world have propelled the company to deliver the highest standard of quality and service. Their fully equipped quality control and testing lab enable them to achieve the absolute best quality in terms of fabric wear and tear, colour consistency, and colour fastness. Over the years, the company’s customers have come to bank on the consistently high-quality standards which is the reason they trust and prefer the D’Decor brand.
For instance, the bed linen in their line of bedding products is the softest in the category, having gained an unmatched level of appreciation from consumers. The true value and emphasis on the quality of their products are due to their presence in more developed markets, which pushes them to constantly adapt and improve their quality and design standards to provide nothing less than the absolute best. The company’s excellent performance over the years can be attributed to the senior team led by the Managing Director, Mr. Ajay Arora. The 3000 employees embody the values and are aligned to the goal of helping consumers ‘Live Beautiful’.
Performance Parameters
D’Decor Home Fabrics has consistently been the winner of several awards for best export performance in synthetic and rayon filament fabrics, man-made embroidery and value-added textile, blended fabrics of synthetic fibre and natural fibres, and fabric-based made-ups. Additionally, it has earned the privilege of being the brand of choice amongst the architect and interior designer community in India, having won the ‘Experts Choice Award’. D’Decor Home Fabrics long regards its growing workforce as its strongest asset, considering all its 3,000 employees as a part of their larger family. With a close connection within the work-family and a strong united team, the company has navigated many challenges and difficulties, like the covid crisis, successfully.
The company spares no expense in ensuring that their employees receive world-class training and mentorship, whilst cultivating a focus on drawing inspiration from the latest global trends and methods of achieving 100% customer satisfaction. The twin aspects of resiliency and growth are the core driving factors of the company and have been the reasons for its exponential success in the foreign market, as well as its survival and subsistence when hit by the pandemic-triggered crisis. Its transition towards a digital way of operation has helped them deliver their products cohesively, dynamically, and swiftly to their consumers despite the constraints of the pandemic.
Technological Leadership
With its understanding that technological and innovative advancements are the signposts of success in the industry, D’Decor Home Fabrics has adopted Industry 4.0 and automation across its value chain. It has enforced the use of performance and quality management software to integrate multiple machines, all on a single platform, which has aided in ascertaining the most frequent downtime reasons, along with identifying the best and worst-performing machines. The company implemented the SAP platform in 2006, a digital platform in 2010, and has 60 CAD stations with a 200-member team in product development.
Moreover, D’Decor Home Fabrics has invested in automated warping machines as well as auto-dye dispensing machines, which has led to a significant boost in terms of efficiency. The company strictly stands by its zero-defect policy by making use of real-time inspection software to identify any defect in the fabric and tending to it immediately. Processes like product tagging, order cutting, shrink wrapping, bar-coding, and dispatch to the warehouse are all automated. D’Decor Home Fabrics has been recognised as the first company to incorporate the Automatic Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) in the Indian textile industry. With its robotic yarn and fabric warehouses that promote high efficiency in storage and goods delivery, D’Decor Home Fabrics has indeed made noteworthy strides in the realm of industrial automation.
Being Sustainable
A journey of great progress must be undertaken responsibly and sustainably, something that few companies in the textile industry have fully understood. D’Decor Home Fabrics has ensured that its path forward will focus on both progress as well as building a stronger footprint on the sustainability front by implementing green practices across its value chain. The launching of their new range of sustainable fabrics, as well as increased focus on recycling and reusability, serves as a testament to their dedication towards environmental harmony. At the factory level, minimal water usage, use of AZO-free dyes, implementation of solar roof panels, and a move away from coal are but a few of the sustainability-focused initiatives that have been successfully implemented by the company.
Wastewater, which is the most notorious pollutant in the textile industry, has been adequately addressed by the setting up of a two-stage biological effluent treatment plant. This plant is capable of treating around 2,855 cubic meters of wastewater daily, which makes it possible to reuse at least 70% of the water. With all its processes in strict compliance with current global sustainability norms, the company endeavours to keep reducing its carbon footprint from its products as well as processes in the coming years.
What’s Next?
The growth journey of building a stellar manufacturing platform with diverse capabilities combined with design excellence was complemented with distribution and brand building over the last two decades.
The next decade would see the company expand its sales points and product offerings in India and diversify its channel mix to ready-mades and furniture manufacturers. It will replicate its strategy of partnering with global brands in these channels and the learnings would help roll out a stronger home solution to the Indian consumer. Offering a wide variety of high-quality products to its customers to build beautiful homes worldwide by leveraging technology and India’s great strengths in the textile industry would enable growth and satisfaction for all its stakeholders.
