Recently, Fabindia released (and later withdrew) an advertisement calling Diwali, ‘Jashn-e-Riwaaz’. This is my unpopular(?) opinion on the controversy (but of course) that followed.Fabindia is, and always was, a fancy-looking place to buy over-priced, bad quality, ill-fitting clothes & other knick-knacks that were passed off as somehow connected to handmade craftsmanship, cottage industry, and rural artisans, with the hope that the buyers who are impressed by ‘branded’ ethnic-wear and who attach quality to anything ‘branded’ will see the in-reality-tenuous connection to India and Indian-ness, which the brand was happy to appropriate and extrapolate to silly levels using badly designed labels (and products), rude service, and constant virtue-signalling in their communication, just so as to cash in on that misplaced sentiment.
That they are suffering from a backlash to this exact virtue-signalling should not, therefore, come as a surprise.
For those ‘liberals’ who want to join in the virtue-signalling by supporting the brand by buying their shit, and by mocking those talking of boycotting it by claiming that they can’t afford Fabindia shit are both feeding into the funnel. The sales funnel. To their US$65 million turnover business.
And both sides are going to end up looking stupid, while William Nanda Bissell, the son of John Bissell, an American working for the Ford Foundation, who founded the Fabindia brand in New Delhi as an export company back in the 1960s (they opened retail in India in 1976) will be off to the bank. Laughing.
Later edit (because apparently, many people are commenting without bothering to read the post carefully): It is amusing to watch Fabindia owners and shareholders laugh all the way to the bank on the backs of virtue-signalling from both right and left wings. The amount of customer engagement they have managed to squeeze out of this (there are literally normally sane liberal-minded people on my own timeline that are pledging and vowing, promising and canvassing for buying Fabindia stuff, taking selfies with the label, and posting using hashtags) would make a social media manager tear up in joy! A small but well-placed, cleverly (or serendipitously)-worded, low res, low budget advert has an RoI that would make the mouths of the most wizened ad-people water. Whether they did it by design or stumbled into this is immaterial at the moment. The owner would be astounded by the positive effect this has had on their brand recall, and surely sales eventually.
