Along with textures and different kinds of structured weaves, yarn-dyed checks are one of the key trends. Varying sizes of checks in different colours and patterns are being seen widely across the globe.

This season, Spykar offers a wide range of checks in various sizes: gingham to buffalo checks, plain tartan checks, graph checks, shepherd’s checks, window pane checks and Madras checks for men’s and women’s range of spring-summer 2018.

A set of core colours, navy, black and red in a combination of white, play the lead in this story. The size of checks and the repeat of pattern add to the play.

Pastel shades are in trend for check patterns. Keeping the base white or any neutral shade, coral shades of blues, greens and pinks are seen in window pane checks and bigger block checks for men and women. There is a hint of glitter or lurex yarn with other design elements in checks for women.

Indigo checks can be seen from dark to light shades and with various wash effects.

The products are styled with trendy techniques of print, embroidery in multi-coloured threads, appliques and badges. Long line shirts, dresses or tunics for women are key silhouettes.

The montage film brings together four talented & influential faces in Kolkata - Suyasha Sengupta, a singer and musician, Chitrangada Chakraborty an actor & photographer, Sambit Chatterjee a drummer and musician, and Ayushman Mitra, an artist & entrepreneur doing what they do best in their own spheres.

Underlined by an edgy soundtrack, the film follows the path of these four youngsters in various corners of Kolkata as they play their music, paint their canvas, and capture poignant moments. Filled with colours, the film goes to the very core of the festive restlessness that they create by being entirely themselves. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and the trendy Autumn-Winter collection by Spykar. The collection fills a void for outdoor enthusiasts and speaks loud & clear that freedom is bold and adventurous just as the millennial of the country.

Sharing his views on the film, Sanjay Vakharia, COO Spykar, says -“We see our brand as truly young and restless which is why we wanted to associate with these four young influencers and make them our brand ambassadors. They are not only talented but also fierce, edgy, fun and of course constantly restless and hungry to create something unique with their vision. Our clothes symbolise the same spirit and they look great in them!"

Suvajyoti Ghosh, co-founder and managing director at Brandmovers India, said “Spykar is an exuberant and youthful brand and we wanted to create a film for the festive season that would stand out. These four faces are unique and fresh and doing really well for themselves - we tried to capture them in their real habitats and bring out the essence of the young and restless brand”

"We plan to launch the Spykar footwear by 2017.

We will invest what's needed and we estimate... Rs 90 crore by 2020," Spykar Lifestyle Chief Operating Officer Sanjay Vakharia told.

"We will be starting with men's wear. The categories we will cater to is flip flops, slippers, shoes. The pricing will start from Rs 599," he added.

The company is aiming to clock a turnover of Rs 325 crore this year, a growth of over 30 per cent from last year's figure of Rs 242 crore.

"We saw a growth of close to 30 per cent in 2015-16 and the consumer segment is quite exciting and is expected to do better in times to come," he said.

Predominantly perceived as a men's wear brand, Spykar expects its women's division to contribute to 30 per cent of sales by 2020 from 15 per cent now.

Launched in 1992, Spykar, which gets 60 per cent of its sales from smaller towns, has 210 franchise stores, which it plans to increase to 400 by 2020.

With e-commerce fast emerging as a preferred mode of shopping, the company expects a sizeable contribution from the online segment in coming years.

"Currently, 6 per cent of our revenues come from online channel. Going ahead, we see 20 per cent of revenues from online," he said.

Spykar currently spends 6 per cent of its revenues on marketing, of which 15 per cent is on digital.

"We will invest Rs 50 crore in the next 3 years on brand building," Vakharia said.

In 2014, NRI businessman Apurv Bagri had acquired a controlling stake in Spykar Lifestyle.

Following this, the company has been investing in new categories, branding and promotions.

Several brands are creating the right noise to attract young audiences to the one-day event which will commences on 19th November. Brands like Viacom18, MakeMyTrip, Spykar are among those who are putting their might behind the event.

Travel firm MakeMyTrip is the official travel partner. It has partnered with Jann Projects Pvt Ltd, organisers of the GCFI for the same.

Others like Spykar which has come on board as the associate sponsor says event will be platform to connect with the youth. “Youth nowadays are close to social issues and this helps us in reaching out to our core target audience,” Sanjay Vakharia, COO, Spykar Lifestyle told Business Line. This is the second mega such association for Spykar after it associated with IPL in the last season.

GCFI is a one-day festival which serves as a tool to raise awareness and drive engagement; mobilizing people to get involved and act towards resolving global challenges outlined by the United Nations at a local level. Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin was signed on last year as the curator of Global Citizen’s music festivals for 15 years.

Bhavya Bishnoi, spokesperson, Global Citizen India said, “The response to our event is overwhelming from event partners. Our ticket contest had received response from 14 million unique visitors. Besides it is heartening to see corporates come forward to support a social cause.”

GCFI’s tickets are selling anywhere between ₹5,000 and ₹4 lakh as per market estimates.

The tickets are earned through actions by first signing up on the websites. Participants can earn rewards with various actions. The contest required 26 actions to gain entry.

The actions are tracked through the Global Citizen online platform and mobile app. Once a participant takes an action, for example signing a petition, the points are registered to their Global Citizen profile. Through the mobile app, we are able to track, with the same technology, when a participant makes a call to their representative’s office.

Free tickets
Bishnoi said that 80 per cent of its tickets were free and only 20 per cent were sold. While Bishnoi did not specify the amount raised either through ticketing or sponsorships, he said GCI is already mulling to take the festival to other cities seeing the response from corporate stakeholders. “Every metro city has a potential even though it is still difficult to monetise from the event”.

Interestingly, the first two phases in which the ticket sales for the Global Citizen Festival India 2016 were opened for online booking are now sold out.

Online ticketing firm BookMyShow had in September which had opened its ticket counter to the public with the limited tickets priced at ₹5000 each too said that the tickets were sold out in few hours.

Hitesh Gosain, Founder and CEO, Onspon said, “Globally entertainment and sports account for the highest sponsorships. A high velocity music event typically can attract sponsorships anywhere between ₹5 and ₹15 crore.”

Commissioned by Spykar Lifestyles, the IMRB study looked at understanding consumers better in terms of knowing their attitude to the denim jeans category as well as brand health and brand perceptions in relative context.

Said Sanjay Vakharia, COO Spykar Lifestyles, "For this year's Autumn Winter Collection, we used Indigo-dyed fabric that fades with every wash, revealing a new blue every time and decided to call it the Blue Collection. We wanted to come up with an unconventional catalogue that every young person will love to go through, and will also resonate with Spykar's quirky, edgy and innovative brand personality."

The campaign is aimed at the millennial generation who are perceived to be open-minded, liberal, expressive, upbeat and passionate. The campaign's microsite (http://www.bluefilmfestival.com) has a series of cheeky videos that reveal a new nuance of the denim. In fact, despite 'blue films' being associated with sleaze, the brand claims that their catalogue films are provocative yet classy.

Says Manish Bhatt, founder director at Scarecrow Communications said, "Sorry ladies and gentlemen of this cultured nation, sorry mothers and dads who regularly check their children's Facebook walls, sorry moral police, sorry local authorities, sorry censor board and sorry all the sanskari people (including Alok Nath). It was great fun playing a nationwide prank with the youth of India. What better way to grab their eyeballs and make them browse through the video catalogue of Spykar's new Autumn-Winter '15 Blue Collection, other than compiling them under the name of 'Blue Film Festival'?"

The brand says that the campaign received the desired eyeballs on the first day itself. Twitter was abuzz with #BlueFilmFestival trending at no. 1 in India. Apart from YouTube, Twitter and the website, the campaign also has a leg on Facebook. (https://www.facebook.com/BlueFilmFestival)

When a 19-year-old man with a high fever turned up after 10pm at a private club in Penang and asked for a meeting with one of its members, he was unsure what kind of reception he would receive. Exhausted from travelling from Calcutta and having contracted typhoid en route, his pitch – to the head of a Malaysian tin producer – might have fallen on deaf ears. But persistence paid off, and the young man returned to India with a major deal under his belt. This would be the first of many successes for Raj Bagri, later to become Lord Bagri CBE and the longest-serving chairman of the London Metal Exchange, a role he humbly says he remains "always grateful for". Lord Bagri CBE Yet it is a career that might not have been. Bagri started work as a filing clerk for a metals firm in Calcutta only because his mother wanted him to

accelerated the market’s modernisation and ensured its continued growth. In 2012, the LME was sold to Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing for £1.388 billion. “In helping the Exchange demutualise, I always knew that this was the first step in a process that would end up with it being a for-profit organisation. To me this always made sense simply because I never saw a contradiction between market efficiency and a for-profit objective, with both mutually reinforcing each other,” he says. “Thinking about the Exchange today, it is good to see that it remains hugely relevant to trade and industry and that its core principles remain the same. It would be wrong though to assume that this status can be maintained, so just as it was 20 years ago, equally today evolution and change are integral to maintaining pre-eminence,” he adds. How the LME changes and adapts over the next 15 years is a topic of hot debate, and Bagri says it is possible that not everything that is done will either be popular or right. “Nonetheless that should not stop the process and change as the market must continue to see how it can serve an industry that is itself changing in terms of geographic areas of net consumption and the types of customer that use our market,” he adds.

Electronic Trading Arrives

Bagri also oversaw the introduction of an electronic trading platform at the LME, launching LMEselect in February 2001. “With the pace that modern technology was developing, the LME creating a proprietary online trading platform was never in doubt, but we had to get the timing right and to deliver a system that would protect our other unique trading methodologies, namely phone and open outcry,” Bagri says. “As all three systems remain active today, I would reflect that the LME board’s approach and timing were a success which delivered, and continues to

'Even today I continue to learn something new almost every day, says Lord Bagri CBE'

deliver, the clients of the market a multiple choice of trading venues, unlike its competitors,” he adds. Retaining the position of the LME as the pre-eminent market for base metals trading is an ongoing challenge for the exchange, which has this year rolled out a Liquidity Roadmap to deliver more electronic trading, more transparency and greater market participation. It includes enhancements to membership categories to allow direct access to LMEselect, plus liquidity and market making programmes which will focus on third Wednesday contracts. “Above all else, our market must fight against complacency and recognise that at key inflection points we are vulnerable to competitors who seek to occupy part of our market place,” Bagri says. “LMEselect, electronic trading and the globalisation of terminals and prices are the key part of the LME’s response. While there should rightly be debate about membership categories and the rights and application of different categories of membership, it is necessary for the Exchange to continue to broaden its appeal – hopefully by expanding membership whilst ensuring that members themselves are able to operate in a healthy and profitable way,” he adds.

Financial Investment

Just as membership of the exchange has changed over the years, so too have levels of financial investment, which have increased significantly in the past decade. Hedge fund and speculative flows often have a dramatic impact on prices, but Bagri says the involvement of financial institutions in the LME has helped create the dynamic market place that it is today. “Much has been said and written about the impact of this financial investment on prices and I am sure that whatever the LME does, this will continue to be something that is talked about for years to come,” he adds. At the centre of the current discussion is the LME’s unique

prompt date structure, which Bagri says remains a “key weapon in the LME’s arsenal in terms of its links with trade and industry.” The fear among some LME members is that the move to promote third Wednesday contracts may take investment volumes from the prompt-date system. Hedge funds typically prefer to use cash-cleared, monthly contracts instead of the prompt date structure of the LME; it is what they trade on the majority of global commodities exchanges. “I know that [the dates system] too is now being discussed, but I hope that whatever the outcome of those discussions, the LME’s owners and other stakeholders always remember that just as the market place needs the involvement of financial players, so too does it need the participation and support of trade and industry,” he says. Industry relies on LME prices, which remain the global benchmark, and there is no reason to suggest this will change unless the exchange itself took steps that alienated it from its core trade and industry customers, Bagri notes. “My sense is that this is something that the LME’s owners are conscious of, and – as someone with deep roots in trade and industry – I hope that the importance of this group to the wellbeing of the market is given adequate recognition,” he adds. Bagri nonetheless acknowledges that the exchange cannot stand still. “The reality is that as a mature exchange the LME already holds the dominant position for global hedging in the base metal markets, so most trade and industrial companies already use LME pricing either directly or indirectly. Future growth has to be sourced from the investment community and through the opening of certain emerging markets” he tells Metal Bulletin Magazine. “As the LME futures price is convergent with the physical market then the investment community prefers LME contracts for metals exposure as opposed to more domestic