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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Anita Lal: A story behind every design
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Anita Lal: A story behind every design

Anita Lal, the founder of Good Earth, on the importance of traditional beauty in design

Anita Lal takes all the creative decisions at Good Earth, including the music that plays across the company’s 10 shops.Premium
Anita Lal takes all the creative decisions at Good Earth, including the music that plays across the company’s 10 shops.

Good Earth founder and creative director Anita Lal, 66, has been toying with her necklace for the better part of an hour as we chat in her “garden studio" in Mehrauli, New Delhi. The necklace is an understated double string of pearls, rubies and emeralds with a gold pendant. “I bought it in Hyderabad years ago," she says.

Lal is also wearing solitaire earrings and green glass bangles, interspersed with diamond-encrusted ones. Everything is beautiful in its own right, but most people would not have put all those elements together in one ensemble. But even the silk-velvet jacket she is wearing features the traditional Ajrakh print of Gujarat, embellished with mukaish, originating in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.

“You can’t put me in any one category," she says several times during the interview. Lal’s aesthetic, and by extension, Good Earth’s, subscribes to two guiding principles: first, contemporizing traditional arts, and second, what she finds attractive.

Now in its 20th year, the company will be sponsoring The Fabric Of India exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, from 3 October-10 January: Good Earth will provide financial support, share posts about handicraft traditions on the V&A blog, and retail products co-branded with V&A at the museum shop. The company, which has nine shops in India and one in Turkey, will also set up a pop-up shop called An Indian Summer at the Liberty London store around the same time as the exhibition.

When Lal opened her first store in Mumbai in 1996, she had little training or experience. “I became an entrepreneur quite by accident," she says.

Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint
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Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint

This was the sum total of her design and retail experience in 1996, when her husband Vikram Lal, then chairman of Eicher Motors Ltd, turned down an offer for a retail space in Mumbai’s Kemps Corner. “I said I’ll take it," says Lal. A recent experience of shopping for her daughter Simran’s trousseau had left Lal disappointed; she thought she could fill the gap.

Was it a steep learning curve? “Supply-chain management, warehousing, merchandising, I knew nothing of all this," Lal says. “But then applying studio pottery learnings to traditional terracotta was also a steep learning curve," she adds.

There weren’t as many home-grown design stores then and Lal’s early entry in the segment meant that she had to go scouting for artisans and materials, and develop her own market. She built up a roster of craftspeople and designers one by one, starting with Asha Madan, a 1994 textile design graduate from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, who has been with the company from the beginning.

I am curious about the company’s design process, and how it manages to stamp collections inspired by places as far apart as Kashmir and the Deccan Plateau, islands in the Indian Ocean and Samarkand and Fergana in Uzbekistan, with an unmistakable Good Earth-ness.

Anita Lal loves spending time with her four grandchildren, aged 5-9. “I have no life apart from work, except my grandkids. Everyone here knows that if my grandchildren are coming here or if they call, I will immediately pack up for the day, she says. Lal loves to tell them tales she collects from online sources and on her travels. “I rework them so they are fun for the children, she says. Historical fiction and jazz music interest Lal: She recently read Alex Rutherford’s ‘Empire Of The Moghul: Raiders From The North’. Her favourite musicians include Cannonball Adderley, Paul Desmond and Stan Getz. “Stan Getz, he’s my top (favourite), she says

“Genghis Khan was quite a dude," Lal says. “His wife, Börte, was kidnapped by a rival tribe soon after they got married. Genghis did not rest till he had rescued her. He forbade the kidnapping of women after that," she says.

This story is part of a much larger set that Lal loves to tell her designers, producers, craftspeople, marketing and sales team, anyone who has anything to do with making, packaging or selling Good Earth products. “You don’t always use the stories. They don’t translate directly into a motif or a design. You can’t pinpoint and say this came from that story. But it’s good to know," she says.

The afternoon light from the large windows in her office catches the green, which spills on to a copy of The Packaging Designer’s Book Of Patterns by Lászlo Roth and George L. Wybenga on her desk. After cups of tea, Lal shows me around the studio to give me an idea of how work happens there.

Lal’s own office is really a large meeting room abutting the pantry; there’s a steady stream of people coming in for cups of tea or just stopping by to talk to her. There are soft boards on practically every wall. The board behind Lal’s desk has photographs, paintings and posters of godmen, flowers, temples and devotees, mounds of colour and steps leading down to the river at the ghats: These are her impressions of Varanasi, the theme for the annual collection of Good Earth products due in October. Mood boards like this one dot the entire office complex.

There are three exits from Lal’s office. Lal takes the one leading to the office of long-time Good Earth designers Asha Madan and Shalini Sethi. Madan and Sethi are poring over the Banarasi saris Lal has just bought off a collector for research. The saris have names like “jamun buti" and “rani chauras", magenta-and-gold, silk-and-zari decadence.

Anything could inspire an idea, says Lal. For the current Samarqand collection, for example, she found a picture of an old Persian painting online. An in-house artist then broke up the picture to cull motifs, curlicues and colour combinations that could be worked into Good Earth products. For the Kashi collection, the Banarasi saris will serve a similar purpose. “Don’t ask me what I spent on these," Lal says.

Money has not been a hurdle at Good Earth in the four years since Simran Lal took over as CEO. Of course, the Lals always had a financial net—the parent company, Eicher Goodearth Pvt. Ltd, loaned them upwards of 45 crore between 1996 and 2012, the year when Good Earth started making a modest profit. In the 2013-14 financial year, the company’s profit before tax was 12 crore.

This newfound independence is also fuelling small extravagances. In 2013, Anita Lal and a team of 19 employees travelled through Uzbekistan, picking up artisanal knowledge and buying artefacts, including a Suzani carpet that is now a wall-hanging in Simran’s office. In November, they travelled to Varanasi for inspiration—Madan’s sketchbook is full of pencil drawings of temple arches, pillars and prayer offerings of flowers from the trip. And now, these saris.

Already, Madan has isolated flower motifs to make wooden blocks for printing. It’s a process of sifting, refining and simplifying an idea till it can be flattened into a motif that will be printed on dinnerware, clothes, upholstery, wallpaper.... “There’s nothing we don’t make," Lal laughs.

The Good Earth’s Tulsi Garden Studio is a mirror image of the company’s shops: The warehouse-turned-studio has a haphazard, unfinished look. Labyrinthine passages connect the pantry at one end to a sampling area at the other. In between, several glass doors and windows bear stickers with patterns like chinar trees and lotuses from Good Earth’s previous collections. They’re a sign: Every idea gets its place under the sun here, till Lal suggests a design tweak—“Lose the yellow border around the flowers on the pillow cover," she tells her swatch maker; “teal, not powdered green, for the jaalis," she tells a designer.

While other companies decry the high rates of attrition and the problem of attracting talent, some of these people have worked with Lal for more than a decade: Designers say they can make what they really want here. Perhaps it’s artistic licence that keeps them there.

We’re back in her office, going through our second round of tea. A Kashmiri naqashi papier-mâché bowl, freshly minted, arrives from the artisan’s workshop. The inside of the bowl is an arresting red, with a small butterfly motif—it almost looks like something artist A. Ramachandran might have made.

“He is one of the artists I truly admire," says Lal. Her husband used to be a keen art collector, and Lal has two of Ramachandran’s sculptures at home. “Ramachandran captures the spirit of nature," she says. The naqashi bowl, she explains, got a simpler, bolder design when they found that the artisans were straining their eyes making intricate designs on the inside. The effect, certainly, is more contemporary.

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Published: 21 Feb 2015, 01:06 AM IST
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