Gifting the gods

Coming from a family that has been trading in fashion jewellery since 1973, Dipesh Kothari, Director of Bipin Jewellers, decided to try something new. He replicated silver lockets of Lord Balaji, which he used to sell, into fashion jewellery made with pewter. He made 50 lockets and distributed them to showrooms.

He then cast a bigger version of the same product — a 4-inch idol of Lord Balaji embellished with chatton stones. An Indian businessman from Canada accidentally spotted this piece when Kothari opened his office drawer — where it was resting for many months — and immediately placed an order for 500 pieces.

The exact shade of red chatton stone the businessman wanted was not available and Kothari cautiously made 300 pieces with a darker shade of red. When the businessman returned to collect his purchase, he was furious and refused to buy the stock that was made for him, saying that he would buy only what he ordered. Time was given to Kothari, who manufactured the required order — but he was worried about what he would do with the redundant 300 pieces, and requested the businessman to buy them too. The businessman instead said indifferently: “Do whatever you want with them, frame them.”

Somewhere down the line, those words struck a chord — Dipesh ‘framed' them alright, and in eight months all 300 Balaji frames were sold.

There are two ways to start a business, says Kothari: “One is to have a brand and a vision and the other is to just let everything come on its own and fall in place. The latter was how Forever began.”

Since then, he, along with his brother Dhiren Kothari, designs and manufactures stylish 23.5 karat gold-plated idols of gods adorned with sparkling Austrian chatton stones under the brand Forever. Apart from wall frames, they use these idols in gift items such as desktop art, car dashboard stands, pen stands and paperweights.

Most of Forever's products have a contemporary look to them. “We never wanted to give our products a traditional feel — it was not meant to be restricted to the puja room. People buy the product as a piece of art,” says Dhiren. Although they were unsure how to scale up business, today they make artefacts of all gods — Ek Omkara and Khanda Sahib for the Punjabis; Shreenathji, Hanuman, Lakshmi, Nakoda Bhairavji, and inscriptions of Allah and the cross. Artefacts of Lord Balaji and Ganesha, with which they began, are very popular.

The Kotharis took a long time to convince a prominent retailer to sell Forever's frames, and Dipesh would anxiously call officials to find out how many were sold. In the first few days, nothing was sold and fearing for the product's fate, the brothers sent a friend to purchase a frame. Half an hour later, the Kotharis went personally to the store to find two pieces had been sold! Forever sells a lot of its products online to NRIs in the US, the UK and France. People buy these frames in bulk as gifts for housewarming functions and weddings.

Dhiren says, “These gift items have a feel-good factor associated with them, and jewellery shops find it easy to sell them.”

The Kotharis have dared to be different and even manufacture black frames. “Jewellers said God and black don't go together and nobody was initially willing to stock the product. Today, black is the fastest moving frame,” says Dipesh.

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