Ramesh Pothy, managing director of Pothys, feels strongly for the handloom industry in India and said that the government's implementation of GST on handloom should be done away with immediately. He added that GST will further strain the already strained handloom industry in the country.
“The handloom industry in India is a highly unorganised industry and we want to promote it as many of our sarees and products are handloom based. Sometimes there is only a husband-wife team which weaves the sarees. Some of them are very poor and struggle to keep their loom running. Now putting the additional burden of GST on them will discourage them and many of them may not pursue it and leave it,” Pothy told THE WEEK.
Pothys, one of the largest retailer in the apparel industry in South India with a special focus on silk, holds a Guinness World Record for creating the world’s longest saree more than a decade back. The company also has a strong focus on the handloom industry.
The Chennai headquartered firm is also trying to bring in new innovations in the field of saree weaving and has tried to revive some of the heritage sarees such as the Kodali Karuppur saree, which otherwise is a dying tradition of saree weaving in Tamil Nadu. “A few year back we had attempted to revive the Kodali Karuppur saree. Each and every thread of this saree has to be carefully woven and only around three people work on it. It took many months for our artisans to work on it and finally the saree was worth Rs 5 lakh at that point of time. We did it out of our interest and not with a commercial sale in mind. Similarly, the attempt in 2005 to create the world's longest single piece sari, that measured 1,276 feet in length and four feet in width was also due to our own interest as we are from a weaving family,” Pothy added.
Currently, the company is focusing mainly on large format stores and is planning to expand their stores across South India. “We strongly believe in only large format stores and search for large real estate spaces that can help us set up our stores in prime locations in a city. We have now inaugurated our store in the heart of Bengaluru city. However, we were scouting for a large real estate space for almost a year before we could set it up here. Right now, we will be concentrating only on the South Indian market and do not wish to go pan India as we find it difficult to get large real estate spaces to accommodate our kinds of stores,” remarked Pothy.
Interestingly, the company has set up a new showroom spread across 1,00,000 sq.ft. consisting of eight floors, in Bengaluru. The company is also selling sarees to NRI customers across countries through its online sales model that is working for it for sometime. Pothys was established over 90 years ago by K.V. Pothy Moopanar and has different brand of silk sarees namely Samudrika, Parampara and Vastrakala to its credit.