With love, Archies
All of us love to give and receive cards, thanks in large part to Archies and its stores. But how did he start, Gargi Gupta asks Anil Moolchandani.
This is the story of a young man, Anil Moolchandani, from a middle class refugee family in Delhi, sometime in the late seventies. His father had a sari shop in the Kamala Nagar market and wanted, as fathers everywhere are wont to do, his son to join the family business. But Moolchandani had other ideas.
A regular reader of Junior Statesman — “it used to be the magazine in those days” — the journal had opened up the wonderful, glamourous world of English music, films and stars beyond his constricted government school education. The star-struck youngster was a regular with dial-in requests on the radio, his ear hooked to the set late into the night waiting for his name to be announced and for the song he’d asked for, a song that he enjoyed but “understood only about 80 per cent”.
That gave the young man an idea: “I thought that there must be thousands like me in India. So why not come up with a song book for them?” So Moolchandani, and his brother (his partner in all his businesses), bought a radiogram and an LP of the number one band in those days, ABBA, got a convent-school going friend to painstakingly take down every word and compiled it into a book, Best of ABBA. “By a stroke of luck, Abba, the film, released around that time and the book was a sell-out,” recalls Moolchandani. Buoyed by the success, the twenty-somethings came out with more song books — Billy Joel, Cliff Richards — branching out soon into movie posters and posters with little motivational messages — “Life is for living”, and so on. Next, and a logical step for Moolchandani, was greetings cards — same message, smaller format, faster moving.
And thus was born a brand —Archies — whose sales of only around Rs 120 crore last year is no reflection of the tremendous nation-wide recall that it enjoys. Not just that, Archies introduced a generation of Indians to the joys of giving and receiving greetings cards, and teddy bears and mugs with cute messages...
As Moolchandani recounts it, Archie’s rise was the outcome of being the first mover in a market that didn’t know any better and so was very tolerant; of luck; of constant innovation to improve quality, and of course, Bal Thackeray. “I’m sure he had his own axe to grind, but he ended doing a world of good to our business,” Moolchandani says, tongue firmly in cheek. Indeed, Valentine’s today contributes as much as 15 per cent of the company’s annual sales. “Today, I even have mothers-in-law buying cards for their daughers-in-law. I think it’s our greatest gift to India.”
But how did he come up with the idea? “Oh, a dealer suggested it. We didn’t even have an idea what Valentine’s Day was, so I wrote to some family members in the US and told them to send us a few cards.” The first year, the company came up with around a thousand cards or so in which, very cleverly, the words “Valentine’s Day” had been deleted. It sold out and Moolchandani sensed an opportunity. Today, Archies has diversified into many such “days” — father’s day, mother’s day, daughter’s day, and from this year even a boss’s day.
Clearly what has worked for Moolchandani is keeping his ears to the ground. “I watch MTV regularly,” he says, “since my target consumer is from 13 to 26. Also, I live in a joint family, my two sons, my brother and his three children. My son is married and if you ask my daughter-in-law who is her best friend, she’ll name me. That’s because I know how she thinks and I never try to impose my wishes on her.”
Not that there haven’t been failure and struggles. The rise of the Internet took a toll since it meant people could send online cards and didn’t need to go to the trouble of buying a card and then posting it. Archies has since come up with its own online portal for cards and gifts, but according to Moolchandani, it’s SMSes that have done far more damage. But the company has expanded its gifts business, increasing the range and price points, so that now cards constitute only about 40 per cent of its business. “Even with cards, the value has gone up. Gone are the days when you could buy a card for as little as Rs 5, today prices start at around Rs 15-30.”
The biggest misadventure for Moolchandani was Archies Music, the music company he set up in 1997, through which he launched the careers of Palash Sen, Shekhar (of Vishal-Shekhar fame), Raima Sen, Pradeep Sarkar, Ali Hyder (in India), and which he closed down only three years later in 2000. “We lost a lot of money,” he says candidly. “But when you are passionate about something, you don’t always look at it realistically. Anyway, we learnt a lot, made good relationships, did what we wanted to do.”
For all his success, however, Moolchandani does not seem to have lost his humble bearings — even today, he says, he can’t think of buying a pair of jeans for Rs 10,000. His only luxury? Sleep — Moolchandani is famous in his family, among his colleagues and even his foreign business partners for going to bed dot at 9.30 pm wherever in the world he is.
It’s a sleep well earned, after all.