Celebrity brand ambassadors become new marketing norm for lawn

Ittehad Textile hires Bollywood star, former cricketer to advertise its products.

FAISALABAD:

As Bollywood tightens its grip globally, Pakistani lawn brands continue with their street-smart strategy of hiring Indian movie stars as brand ambassadors to advertise their products in the local and international markets.

Surging demand for lawn and stiffer competition as more and more businesses enter the market, textile mills, designers, and campaigners are seeking new and innovative ways to promote their brands. Lawn brands are spending millions of rupees on marketing their products.

Ittehad Textile Industries hired Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra for marketing their women’s range and former Pakistani cricketer Waseem Akram for its menswear’s brand, i-man.

“We need well-known faces to make clients feel good about our products,” said Nazim Sheikh, CEO of Ittehad Textiles Industries, while talking exclusively to The Express Tribune.

Sheikh believed that to sell their products locally or globally, celebrity brand ambassadors were the best way to get noticed in an increasingly competitive environment.

“Ittehad Textiles produces the world’s best quality lawn fabric, for which it imports raw cotton, specifically Pima Cotton and Egyptian brand Giza Cotton, from the United States,” said Sheikh.

The company has four factories under its wing to process raw cotton to the finished product. Raw cotton is converted into yarn at Ittehad Spinning Mills, which is then converted into gray cloth at Ittehad Weaving and finally the cloth is dyed and printed at Ittehad’s own printing and dying units.

Sheikh said that Ittehad Textiles had tight controls to ensure high quality products, and that is why the company is known across the globe.

Ittehad’s lawn products range between Rs1,200 to Rs5,000 per piece, while digital lawn products ranged between Rs5,000 to Rs12,000 per suit. Printing the lawn digitally was significantly expensive, as it costs Ittehad Rs400 per metre, while regular lawn printing costs Rs30 per metre.

Ittehad Textile’s local sales are growing at an annual rate of 50%, while its international sales are growing at a pace of 20% annually.

The major markets of Ittehad’s lawns were United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, India, Bangladesh, Italy and France. In the fashion cities of Paris, Dubai and New York, consumers preferred digital lawn fabric. Sheikh also added that in those cities, Ittehad’s beachwear dresses were selling like hotcakes. “The demand for lawn in the international market is very high, especially in India,” he said.

To design their lawn products, the company hires designers from universities and fashion colleges, thus creating an opportunity for fresh grads.

Elaborating on the climbing demand for lawn, Sheikh said that climate change was one of the reasons behind acceptability of lawn fabric across the country.

Few years ago, lawn was only worn as casual dresses, but now people prefer to wear fabrics made of lawn in wedding ceremonies and parties, said Mehwish Khalid Basra, a customer while taking to The Express Tribune.

She added that Ittehad’s digital lawn range was attracting customers because it was available in 100 colours and had 14 different style categories.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 14^th, 2013.

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