I wanted to respond to some common questions about one of our newest plus features, eShakti. I recently interviewed B.G. Krishnan, C.E.O., and asked him some questions brought to me by About Plus-Size readers.
Read on to learn more about product quality, shipping, and care details.
Q: Quality is a huge concern for plus shoppers. Are your pieces colorfast?
A: Yes, all fabrics that we use are lab-tested for color-fastness and unless they pass the test, they don’t go on. There is a quality protocol for fabric that is quite elaborate and we tend to reject a good proportion of what we first look at during the quality stages.
Q: Since your items are designed in India, are they hand-embellished?
A: All embellishment is hand-done through traditional craftsmen. Once a customer chooses a style and size, the embellishment is hand-marked on the product and then embroidered for custom clothes. Where hand-block printing is involved, the designs in the blocks are hand-carved and then hand-printed with natural and indigo-based dyes. Many of the shawls we offer are vegetable dyes hand-done.
Every garment that is ordered is typically individualistic and hand-crafted either completely or partially. Each garment gets a lot of personal attention through the entire manufacturing and order-processing stage – fabric, pattern-making, hand-cutting, embroidery, stitching of course, hand-finishing and packing. Many of these are done by highly skilled people, some among them being traditional artisans.
Q: What are some general care instructions for customers to keep in mind?
A: In general, we try to keep our garments easy care.
- For the heavy embellished designs with sequins and beads on cottons, we suggest a gentle hand-wash.
- For thread embroideries with no embellishments, it is machine-wash, gentle cycle.
- For tulles/silks with embellishments, we suggest dry-cleaning.
- For plain silk, we suggest machine-wash, gentle cycle.
All garments go with suitable wash-care instructions.
Q: How would you compare your quality to other companies offering similar services?
A: Quality in a given style consists of four things: fabric, fit, fall, finish.
I think our fabrics compare favorably with the better brands and we are engaged in getting better each month. In fit and fall, we rate ourselves ahead of competition since we take a lot of care to individually fit and check each garment at each manufacturing stage to ensure that we get it right. Our finish is the best you can find for hand-made garments and is now comparable to what you see with machine-made, mass-produced apparel and is sometimes even better because of the individual care that each item of apparel gets.
Even though we have a no-questions, money-back guarantee and offer customized clothes, and only sell online, we get no more than 10% sales returns at our Seattle office – which we believe compares favorably even with offline stores in the USA where the customer gets to touch, feel and try on the clothes before she buys them.
We have had unacceptable delays in our shipping time in the recent past, and we have now fixed it. Timely shipping is an essential aspect of the quality a company gives its customers, and we aim to improve dramatically in our delivery lead times beginning right now.
To let the customers know we mean it, during this month we have informed them that we will ship 100% of our orders on time and to back it up, we have offered a $15 cash-back in case of any delay. That is one cash-back we are working hard to avoid entirely!
