The Italians are really passionate about leather. If you touch good leather, they like to say, it should be like touching velvet. Pasta and wine vie for this position on top. But leather wins.

Sunil Suresh of Stanley Seating appreciates such a passion—many a time a victim of it. As do his boys, though in their case, it takes on a distinct Indian tone. (If a piece of leather falls to the ground, they pick it up and hold it to their eyes in reverential apology.)

This passion, and the resulting quality is why Q, when designing his custom Aston Martin for Bond, (Old James, you know), had no second thoughts about choosing a Stanley seat. Neither did a certain Saudi prince who wanted good leather seats for his yacht. Nor Azim Premji, Vijay Mallya or any of the owners of private airplanes in India. Or any of the car owners who walk into Suresh’s Bangalore office saying, “I want a good leather seat for my car. Here’s my key.”

Car-sheds and Rat holes
Which is hardly what one Mr. Sethi, who used to be in charge of the Indian operations of General Motors, thought when he first visited Suresh several years ago. Stanley was supplying seats to the GM dealers in Delhi for the after-market—cars that were already rolled out of the dealership—and they had a name as suppliers of fairly decent leather seats. When GM decided to get seats from India on an OEM basis, they considered Stanley Seating, and discussions were held over the telephone, for over six months.

Then Sethi said that he would have to visit the plant. He was duly picked up from the airport and brought to “this small little car-shed of mine.” After the initial small talk he asked Suresh where his plant was located, and was not a little startled to hear that “oh, this was it.”

“He’s a big six footer, he turned all red, and thundered at me, “You dare to call this rat hole a plant, and you want to be a vendor for GM?” Suresh chuckles. “And I said yes.”

This was to be the making of Stanley Seating. Realizing that they had the right attitude, and knowing that Suresh had the knowledge, Sethi became benevolence personified. He gave them the deal. Not only that, upon learning that they had no money to get the material—forget the machines—he actually gave them some $100,000 as advance payment—the first time in the history of GM in India.

After this break, the path ahead was more easy to beat. Ford wasn’t long in coming, and today Stanley makes seats for Hindustan Motors, Telco and M&M, besides a few Bentley and Rolls Royces for the after-market. It is negotiating a deal with Daimler-Chrysler, and hopes to start making seats for them in a couple of years. Suresh has also poked a toe into the niche market of aerospace leather, having done seating for Learjets, a couple of Singapore companies and Jet Airways, not to mention, of course, the high-flying Indian millionaires. As for the Aston Martin project, Suresh hopes to do the OEMs for the particular model when it rolls off the production lines in 2006.

Quite a long way from when he used to hang around parking lots and “run behind every good-looking car in town” asking bemused car owners “hey, why don’t you leatherize your seats”.

By the skin of his seat
Suresh has been into leather for well over fifteen years now. After a stint at the Central Leather Research Institute, he started his career as production manager for a leather garment exporting company called Sri Hari Exports that used to manufacture and export high quality leather garments to the U.S. and European markets. The boss he worked for allowed him unbridled freedom to get into the industry. He was allowed to spend time in all the different units, tanneries among the others. As a result, he had an early, and quite thorough understanding of the industry. He worked there for seven years.

After he left, he started his own company. It was 1994, and the export business wasn’t doing too well, so he decided to focus on the domestic market, making and selling handbags and haversacks. Those days, he says, haversacks themselves were something new, not to mention ones made of leather. The results weren’t too encouraging. His having lately found himself a wife didn’t make things any easier.

After some brooding over the matter he hit upon the idea of making car seats out of leather. After all, they were quite popular around the world, so why not in India? He suggested this idea to his wife who, to deduce from the fact that she laughed out loud, didn’t think the plan very feasible.

Undeterred by this marked lack of enthusiasm, he set about his new enterprise with gusto. He started with a small shop and a workforce of five, all told. A significant amount of his time was spent approaching the owners of the better sort of cars and offering to make leather seats. People were encouraging, and before long he went to Delhi and Bombay with his idea.

To his delight, business boomed, and the growth of the company over the years was quite rapid. The production area doubled every six months, as did his workforce. From the skinny five-member team of the heady early days, it has expanded to a respectable 210 now. This team, which he likes to call his ‘skill-martix’, are all between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age, and all of them have been with him for the last ten years. “They are switched on, and like to learn,” he proclaims proudly. “With such a system in place it is very difficult to go wrong.”

When he started off, it was on money borrowed from friends and family (“never from banks till date, and I don’t plan to”). The total came upto $20,000; today the turnover stands at a solid $7.7 million. Profits are “good, ten to fifteen percent in some cases, twenty in others.”

End-to-end, except the cows
Stanley Seating is into nearly every aspect of the business, starting from the import of leather, through manufacture, to wholesale and retailing. They have entered the domestic market too, with a range of furniture. They have three showrooms (one in Delhi and two in Bangalore) and plan to open six to eight more in the next two years.

They import most of the leather from Italy, and a little from Germany and Sweden. In India, though excellent leather is available for, say, shoes, good upholstry-grade leather is simply not available. This is because Indian cattle, though no doubt of sterling character, are nowhere close to their European cousins in size. And to make a sofa or car seat—even a medium sized one—larger panels of leather are needed. The continental bovine ilk weigh upto 600-700 kilograms, which, in leather-speak, translates to 50 or 60 extra square feet of leather. Not only that, Italians having been into leather upholstry for decades more than we, the quality of tanning is also far superior to anything we have in our country. Mastrato, for one, is a family run business, one of the largest and oldest in the world. Once the finished leather arrives, Suresh’s “boys” embark on their cut-and-sew operations.

“It’s very important to know which portion of the hide should go into what part of the chair—the seat, headrest, bottom back and so on,” explains Suresh. “Animal skins have various strengths.” The back, for example is thick and stiff, so it’s better suited for the seat. The belly part, on the other hand, is not so strong. “It’s a natural product, and you can’t control it. But once you learn how to use it, you can get a world class product.”

All the expertise at his call wouldn’t amount to much without good technology to harness it. Suresh realised this quite early on, and invested well and wisely in the best machines that money could buy. He uses German machines that are used by most of the top companies in the world. He’s got slow, and very accurate machines, for sewing, and others for bleaching and dyeing; he’s even got one for perforating the leather, the first ever to land on Indian shores.

Asked about the marketing, he gets enthused again. “Leather has to be marketed the way it has to. There’s a story to it, a feel to it. It’s a feel and touch industry. The customer has to relax, take his time to choose.”
Nudged into specifics, he reveals that for volumes, they go to the OEM market. It’s a competitive one, and they hardly get good margins, but it is necessary for the bulk of the business to keep going. The aftermarket involves customizations and specializations, and the margins are better.

As for retailing, he says, a curious thing has happened. In the course of bringing his company to where it stands now, he has, quite without realizing it, collected about 70 different kinds of leather which he can offer off the shelf—a unique collection by any standard in the world. By sometime next year, he plans to bring up the total to a hundred, and then “go around the world marketing them”.

This is something that has huge potential, in fact Suresh goes so far to say, “Even though all the leather comes from Italian tanneries, we can still sell back to the Italians. This is because if you go to a tannery you would have to buy at least 5000 square feet per color, enough for 30-40 cars. If someone wants to do the seating for just one car, he can come to me, and I’d do it for him with a small additional margin.”

A Nappa Hand
Get him started on leather, and he has a trove of fascinating details to reveal. “Although it is looks like a very simple subject from outside, it is actually a very intricate subject.”

Not too much later, you find yourself believing him. A particular breed of sheep which eats a particular kind of grass, it turns out, gives a better kind of leather than any other. For golf gloves, similarly, there is particular lamb that gets the golfer the best swing, not to forget the follow-through. Several high-end shoe companies are similarly choosy. They have gone around the world, and source leather from only one or two places. In Stanley’s seats too, it’s not exactly simple to make seats for aircrafts and yachts. To get them efficiently in the air, seats have to be lighter than average. As for yachts, the leather has to pass rigorous saline tests before the Saudi princes can lean back in them.

The Holy Grail of leather which, unlike the name sake has been found—and found to be incomparable—is Nappa leather. It’s soft, and porous, but this description hardly does any justice to the leather. The porosity makes it ideally suited for air-conditioning Indian weather conditions—the steering remains cool to the touch for quite some time after. A steering wheel in Nappa leather costs some $40. A leather seat costs anywhere between $300 to $600. A sofa can cost as much as $2500.

Oh James, it’s a Stanley
And how did Suresh land that James Bond contract? Well, Aston Martin is owned by Ford, and Stanley had been vending to Ford for the past five years or so. Still, Suresh was slightly surprised to hear that the company wanted the entire prototype to be done by Stanley. Would, the British company wondered, Stanley be able to handle it?

“As long as it’s leather,” Suresh informed them, “I’ll handle anything.”