Like all good ideas, the idea for Welspun Flooring came out of a spirited conversation between the company’s now CEO Mukesh Savlani, his managing director and the chairman of parent company Welspun Group. At the time, Welspun Group was already successfully manufacturing line pipes, home textiles and steel. Yet there was a general feeling it could do something innovative within the world of flooring.
“The idea for Welspun Flooring came when we were looking at how residential interiors have changed over the years in India,” says Mukesh. “Interior design has gone through a number of different phases.
It’s moved from paint to wallpapers, we’ve seen a trend for carpenters making bespoke furniture for the home and office, to a desire to buy flat-packed and ready-made pieces. So much has evolved but the one thing that hadn’t changed much was flooring.
India is predominantly a tile country, which is a textile neither easy nor convenient to install. We decided we wanted to change that.” While Mukesh only took over the CEO role two years ago, he’s been part of Welspun Group for 18 years.
“I joined straight out of college and came in as a management trainee in the sales department, particularly for the US market. It’s been wonderful to watch the company grow over that time and I’ve learned so much,” Mukesh says.
“When I became CEO of Welspun Flooring, I wanted to take that experience and turn it into success, and I wanted us to be known for doing things differently to other flooring companies in India. We have already succeeded in this regard. We did it by first noticing that very few of our competitors had a customer service department, and so this became an ‘aha!’ moment for us. We then knew that Welspun Flooring needed to become a company that would not only bring easy-to-install flooring to the masses, it would also take care of the customer experience.”
Since its launch two years and nine months ago, the focus for Welspun Flooring has been on spreading this customer experience message – a message of convenience and innovation for those looking to redecorate the floors in their homes or offices.
Mukesh and his team have put all their efforts into making sure the customer understands the product and now that they do, the team is shifting its focus to expanding the business. “The next 12 to 18 months for us are all about channel expansion.
As of today, we have 32 distributors throughout the country and we have about 450 dealers. We are targeting about 50 distributors in the next two years and getting to around 3,000 dealers throughout the country,” Mukesh says.
“We’re also expanding our customer service offering, establishing our own network and aiming to have people in the company who can come into homes and install the flooring for our customers. We think that full-service offering will really add something special to the customer experience with Welspun Flooring.”
Very few of our competitors had a customer service department and so this became an ‘aha!’ moment for us.
Customer experience and innovation may be the driving forces behind the success of Welspun Flooring but both concepts are backed up by state-of-the-art facilities. “We manufacture our products with one goal in mind – customer satisfaction,” Mukesh says.
“The way we have constructed our factory, how we have selected our equipment and even how we choose the partners and suppliers we want to work with has always had to answer certain criteria: how will it help us make the customer experience better, and does this new way of doing things bring new ideas to the table?
Choosing only the best, and the most state-of-the-art, has helped us in all areas of the business but, most importantly, it has ensured we can now deliver flooring to our customers from factory to home in two weeks, where typically it takes more than eight.
“With our world in a pandemic, we are ensuring that everybody is safe and healthy in the Welspun Flooring family. We’ve all taken working from home in great spirit, using this time for training and continuing strategic work via tech. We’re keeping morale high with fun engagements, like online singing competitions. Our plant is kept sanitised, safe and ready to kick-start operations with the right health guidelines, once the Government gives the go-ahead.”
Proudly supported by:
