Source: indiapost.com

Long before outsourcing became a byword of trade, John Bissell of Hartford discovered Indian artisans and trained them to work for exports. Educated at the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, and at Yale, his love for India began as a child, listening to tales his father told of his time in India during World War II. After college, John Bissell worked at Macy’s, and began to like the look and feel of hand-woven fabrics.

Those two interests merged in 1958, when he was given a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation to instruct Indian villagers in making goods for export. Once his grant expired, John Bissell decided to stay back. He founded a business, Fabindia Ltd., that bought locally produced items like durries, rugs and exported them.

In 1958, well before American companies were sourcing from India, John Bissell left his position as a buyer for Macy’s New York to work as a consultant for the Ford Foundation in order to develop India’s export potential in its emerging textile industry. What Bissell discovered was a village-based industry with a profusion of skills hidden from the world.

”The greatest thing that happened to our business was the move in Europe and America a few years back to the natural look — natural textures, natural fibers — and away from things like polyester and nylon,” he said in a 1977 interview. Determined to showcase Indian handloom textiles while providing equitable employment to traditional artisans, Bissell established Fabindia in 1960 in order to fuse the best aspects of East/West collaboration.

Fifteen years later the first Fabindia retail store was opened in Greater Kailash, New Delhi with a range of upholstery fabrics, durries and home linens. By the early eighties, they started producing garments made from hand woven and hand block printed fabrics.

Over the years the focus of Fabindia’s marketing shifted from exports to the local Indian retail market. What started as an export house has today become a successful retail business presenting Indian textiles in a variety of natural fabrics, and home products including furniture, lights and lamps, stationery, home accessories, pottery and cutlery. Extending this partnership to the farmers in rural areas, Fabindia launched its organic food products range in 2004.

Fabindia Sana, the company’s authentic body care products range has also been launched at all Fabindia outlets. Fabindia sources its products from over 15000 craft persons and artisans across India. They blend indigenous craft techniques with contemporary designs to bring aesthetic and affordable products to today’s consumers.

They provide customers with hand crafted products which help support and encourage good craftsmanship. Fabindia works closely with artisans by providing various inputs including design, quality control, access to raw materials and production coordination.

The vision continues to be to maximize the hand made element in products, whether it is textiles, block printing, embroidery or home products. John Bissell married Bimla Nanda, who served as social secretary for Chester A.

Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith when they were United States Ambassadors to India. His business flourished despite his widely known family connection to Richard M. Bissell Jr., the legendary Central Intelligence Agency operative who was his uncle. Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, William, who now runs Fabindia, and a daughter, Monsoon.

Source: business.timesonline.com
A look into the new world of web-based services opening up for the cash-rich but time-poor

“The most unusual request?” ponders Anya Portnik, the chief executive of iwantaPA.com , a start-up based in London’s upmarket Park Lane. “That would be the investment banker that employs us to read a story to his daughter every evening, for an hour, in French.”

Welcome to the world of “person-to-person outsourcing”, where the cash-rich time-poor use the web to outsource those irksome personal tasks – booking holidays, tracking down prospective life partners, educating children – that threaten to upset their precarious work-life balances.

According to Evalueserve, an India-based research firm, the market for outsourced personal services, where people hire remote “Bangalore butlers” and “time finders”, was worth more than $250 million this year. It is expected to hit more than $2 billion by 2015.

“It probably saves me a couple of hours a week. More, recently, in the run-up to Christmas,” says Caroline de Courreges, an American expat who works 11-hour days for a fund of hedge funds in Mayfair and outsources her personal administration to AskSunday. com, an outfit that looks after the tiresome jobs that plague high-flyers as much as mere mortals.

“I use it via my BlackBerry for making restaurant reservations and booking flights mostly,” she says. “The little things that everybody could do, but take up the ten minutes here, ten minutes there that I just don’t have.”

AskSunday, which channels work to sites in India and the Philippines, charges $29 (£14.60) a month for its basic package. That buys access to a “24/7 personal assistant”, accessible on the phone or via the web for up to 30 tasks a month.

Avi Samudrala, the former investment banker turned private equity staffer who co-founded the company, says that there is no typical customer. “I use the laptop analogy,” he says. “What a schoolkid, a student and a Wall Street analyst are going to use it for are very different.” But he does split up the broad classes into which AskSunday’s thousands of customers fall.

Average urbanite tasks include tracking down consumer goods – from “the hottest Manolos to a shirt for tomorrow’s board meeting”. For those too busy to engage in retail therapy, Sunday will track down the best prices and place an item on hold. Call bridging – where the site calls a doctor, gas company or telephone provider and stays on hold until the right person is on the other end – is pitched at the same set.

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