When you sit across from Ajai Vir Sing, it’s quickly clear – when he talks style and fabric and collections, and once you notice that he’s much better dressed than your average Y chromosome club member – that fashion is the driving force of his life. The funny thing is that his compact, bottom-line-now attitude suggests that he could just as easily be up to his eyeballs in something more grounded and less airy (no offense meant to fashion people!), like selling real estate, running a café, or importing stereos.
Ajai doesn’t seem like a fashion guy at first perhaps because, well, that wasn’t what he was at first. Ajai came of professional age in the world of advertising. A native of New Delhi, Ajai first came to Colombo in the mid 1990s as an executive with global ad firm Grey Advertising. “Advertising was my day job, but I always had a passion for fashion,” he says. “Even as a kid I was very conscious of what I wore.”
That passion drove him to eventually leave full-time advertising, and to set about laying the foundations for the development of the Sri Lankan fashion industry.
Part of the draw was that he saw a lot of potential. “I always felt that Sri Lanka had amazing wealth when it comes to creative industries. Architecture was very well developed, interior design was very well developed… I mean, there was an amazing sensibility in it. There are also amazing photographers out there. I thought that somewhere there is a fashion sense that needs some kind of pulling out and needs to be put together.”
The Problem with Sweaters
An early problem that Ajai encountered, is that although Sri Lanka has a large garment and apparel industry, that doesn’t mean it is a natural hotbed of fashion designer talent. In fact, he says, the fact that Sri Lanka has a large garment and apparel industry has hurt the cultivation of fashion designer talent.
How so? When he started looking at Sri Lanka’s fashion industry in earnest, Ajai explains, “Any young kid coming out of school here with a fashion degree would go into the apparel industry. But that’s not really fashion.” He elaborates: “Years ago, I was asked to give a lecture [to recent fashion graduates]. In their final term, these graduates were designing winter wear. I asked them, have you ever worn a sweater or a jumper before? They said no. I said, then how can you design it? Then I realized that this was a demand that came from the apparel industry… I realized that the natural tendency of people to design what their environment demanded was being killed.”
A first step was to find some designers – amongst those who were not spending their time thinking about woolies – to populate the first Colombo Fashion Week in 2002. But Ajai’s vision was to do more than just put on a flashy show, which is the main focus of the event companies that run fashion shows elsewhere in the world. “Colombo Fashion Week was run going by people who understood how to unearth designers, how to implement the curriculum of fashion schools, how to pick young designers, put them under training with international designers and somehow give them confidence so that they could stand on their own as fashion designers – so they wouldn’t have to go looking for jobs in the apparel industry,” he says.
Fashion Challenges
Ajai and his team soon realized that finding talented fashion designers was only a small part of the puzzle – and maybe even the easy part. The other building blocks of a fashion industry had to be put into place. “Every year, we’ve picked one or two aspects [of the fashion industry] and worked on it,” he says. One challenge facing fashion designers was sourcing fabric. Sri Lanka does not make fabric – which is a bit of a problem if you’re a fashion designer in Sri Lanka.
Then there was the issue of production. The local garment industry wasn’t geared to the relatively small production volumes of fashion designers. Also, retailing was a problem; it made sense to market to a local audience, but there was little understanding of how to best sell fashion in stores. A member of Ajai’s team was charged with conducting training workshops for some of the better-known stores in Colombo, to “teach them the dynamics of fashion retail, because they had not done fashion retailing,” Ajai says.
Ajai and his team sent some of the country’s more promising fashion designers abroad to broaden their exposure. As local designers moved up the learning curve, international buyers were invited to Colombo. “Sri Lanka did not have huge credibility as a fashion destination, so to get the buyers in, it took us a lot of convincing,” Ajai recalls.
Ajai put together reciprocity agreements with other fashion weeks, so that designers from the Miami, Malaysia, Russia and other fashion industries could show their work in Colombo – and, in turn, local fashion designers had the opportunity to make a splash on other stages globally.
It took time, but now, Ajai says, “the floodgates have opened.” “We showcase 20-25 designers a year and we have close to probably another 25-30 designers on the waiting list.”
Off to the Beach, Boat, Pool, Holiday…
So Ajai recently did what most businesses do once they’ve gotten some traction: Expand. Drawing upon the kernel truth that it makes sense to design what you know, Ajai launched a second fashion week “to stretch Sri Lankan designers to think within the environment they live in… resort wear is a growing category, and we can become the hub for resort wear, because we are surrounded by resorts, not just in Sri Lanka but in the region.”
So what, exactly, is resort wear? “Earlier, people would buy [clothing] for spring and summer, thinking, OK, I am going to wear this to work and then when I go to a resort, I’ll just take it and go.” But things have changed, Ajai continues, in how people think and pack their clothing. Resort wear is “a combination [of] swim wear, beach wear, holiday wear and cruise wear… you go to a resort, you go for a swim in the morning, you come back, you want to have a coffee or a quick snack with your wife in the restaurant which is off the pool. But you can’t walk in there wearing your wet swimsuit, and you have to put something on, from there you also have your evening before you go for dinner – and living in a resort you can’t be seen in the same outfit that you wore during the day. So that becomes your holiday wear, like a nice white shirt and a half knee trousers, so it’s a combination of four categories [swim, beach, holiday and cruise wear] which are very relevant to a resort.”
Making Money
Resort wear is part of Ajai’s strategy to take his enterprise to the next level. Strictly speaking, though, until recently it wasn’t even an enterprise; Ajai’s organization was a not-for-profit until he only recently converted it into a bottom-line oriented corporation. Colombo Fashion Week already has a good start, as it enjoys strong support from external sponsors. Well, not sponsors: “I never call them sponsors… they’re partners… I actually gave them a marketing solution… you spend this much, this is how much you get, this is how you grow marketing-wise… so it’s not just a sponsor but a partnership.”
A next step, slated to come on line in the coming months, in an online retail portal for designers who show at Colombo Fashion Week. Designers will be able to display their wares, and buyers will be able to make contact, and Ajai’s organization will take a small cut. Meanwhile, designers are being encouraged to focus on accessories and other goods – from iPad cases to wallets to T-shirts – that have the designer’s signature on them. These develop the image of the designer, and can also be profitable on their own.
Meanwhile, Ajai has his own fashion lines: Arugam Bay, a beachwear line; a menswear label called Stringhopper; and an ethical men’s label called Conscience that uses only organically grown cotton. In addition to generating cash flow, Ajai hopes to lead Sri Lanka’s fashion industry by example with his own products.
“I have created brands that in brand equity terms are quite rich, and in business terms they are consistently growing,” he says. “But if I was in the west somewhere I probably would have gotten bought out by private equity or venture capital and made millions overnight,” he says with a laugh. “Here it is all organic growth.”
On the Brutality of Fashion
It’s not all glitter and flash, though. “Fashion weeks are the most brutal and the most glamorous business meetings in the world.” Glamour, OK: Beautiful people wearing skimpy clothing, the catwalk, all of that. But brutal?
Yes, Ajai says, because failure – which, statistically, is the most likely outcome – is out there for everyone to see. “The designer works on his whole collection, and he’s not an artist; he wants to sell this. So the media comes there and either they thrash him or build him up, and the buyers are sitting there. They have to make a call: Am I buying this one or am I buying the next one? So it’s hit and miss, because you can put three months of work into your collection, and your investment might be worth zero. It’s such a fickle, emotion sell. So it’s a very cut-throat kind of business.”
Words of Wisdom
What would Ajai tell a recent fashion school graduate who is dreaming of the catwalk? Three things.
First: Hunger. “Hunger drives your integrity, your need to learn, everything you do, hunger is really, really important,” he says. Otherwise you’ll wind up as fashion road kill, unloved and unsold.
Next, Ajai stresses the importance of finding your own point of view as a designer – some kind of design signature, the thing that makes your product unique. “A designer needs to experiment and identify his point of view. It might be wrong: You need to find the right one.” Otherwise you won’t be noticed.
Finally, be humble. “I’ve seen casualties in fashion in Sri Lanka, fashion designers who have done one big collection, and they thought they were the next Armani, and they have fallen flat the next year,” he cautions. “When you are in a small place like Sri Lanka the applause comes very quickly, but also the boos come really fast as well, so being humble is really, really important… when then you’re very grounded then you are absorbing everything around you, observing who’s buying what, learning, listening to people, understanding trends – so that part of humbleness is really important.”