Making millions on home improvement

Usha Varadarajan is reticent about her early life and believes it's best to start her story at the point where she became an entrepreneur by setting up a small export company, Kashika Enterprises, in a small rented room and with a bank loan of Rs 25,000.

The business grew steadily over the years and eventually Varadarajan expanded into the domestic market  --  and The Next Shop was born. The product portfolio has now expanded to include every imaginable home product. Meanwhile, the original export business is still going strong, with a Rs 15 crore (Rs 150 million) turnover.

With time, Varadarajan knows she'll have to play a less active role in the running of the business  --  but for now she's very particular about every aspect of it. ("Make sure you get the name right," she says, "it's shop, not store.")

I don't want to talk too much about my life before I started the business. Suffice it to say that around 1982-83 I was at the crossroads of my life and had to start from scratch.

During trips abroad I had been exposed a lot to the retail scenario overseas, and I had also done a course in textile designing from a night school in New York in the late 1960s. So it occurred to me to start a small export company.

I began operations with one sewing machine and one tailor, in a rented room. The most I could borrow from a bank without collateral was Rs 25,000 so I made do with that to start with.

It was a simple start  --  I like doing things slowly and steadily, and don't believe in running when one can walk. So we made and exported only cushion covers at first, and then after a couple of years we gradually began expanding on a modest scale  --  by making table linen and bed linen.

Everything was made in-house at the time. It took a lot of hard work to build contacts and find buyers who would take our products  --  this was pre-liberalisation and things weren't as easy as they are now.

In 1991, my daughter Rathi joined the business. She wasn't too keen at first, and I wasn't going to coerce her, but she changed her mind later  --  after working briefly with Citibank, she said she wanted to join me.

I made her do a course at NIFT and then put her through all the possible levels of work. Today, of course, she's a lot better than I am; she looks after production and monitors orders while I oversee the finances.

After a few years the business was sufficiently secure and I thought it was the right time to get into the domestic market. So we opened The Next Shop in 1995.

The idea was to have a consolidated store for home products. Soon we started product diversification on a big scale, moving from textiles to all sorts of things that go into the making of a home.

We now deal in everything from glassware, ceramic pottery and lampshades to handbags and quilts. Recently, we have also introduced a range of products for children. These include quilts with specific themes that will appeal to children; baby gift bed sets; and educational toys.

Most of our products are now sourced from outside, but I maintain strict quality control over everything we retail. Meanwhile, the exports division is still going strong.

We have two showrooms  --  one in Delhi and one in Noida  --  and the third will soon come up in Gurgaon.

For now, there are no plans to move out of the national capital region  --  as I said before, I like to be slow and steady. But we have seen a growth of around 15 per cent in each of the last few years, and I am happy with that.