Comments
In the early 2000s, CK Venkataraman, the Managing Director of consumer goods major Titan Co Ltd, had an offer to head the Levi’s business in India. After Titan’s founding MD, Xerxes Desai, heard that Venkat had put in his papers, he called Venkat in and bawled him out. He said — recalls Venkat — that Titan is one big family, and you don’t quit on family! So, Venkat withdrew his resignation and continued in the company. In retrospect, just as well, as Venkat went on to head Tanishq for 17 years, which now contributes to over 80 per cent of Titan’s revenues and wound up as MD of the company. And Titan now, in terms of market cap, is the second largest in the Tata group. But Venkat’s affinity for Levi’s continued as his favoured brand of clothing is Levi’s jeans.
And he’s in Levi’s jeans paired with an ethnic casual shirt the morning we meet him at the Leela Palace on Bengaluru’s old airport road for breakfast. Only, it’s Venkat’s day of intermittent fasting, so he’s having just a cup of black coffee. We order an omelette, idlis and dosas and some coffee, feeling a mite guilty that Venkat won’t be eating anything. Titan has been on a red-hot ride past few years and its growth has been closely dissected and analysed while news from its various divisions emanates every other day, so we decide to ask Venkat more about his life and times and what makes the watch man-turned-jeweller tick.
Venkat spent the first five years of life in Mettur, near Salem, where his father worked for Mettur Chemicals. His grandfather was a lawyer in Coimbatore and in 1970 the family moved in with him into a sprawling 10,000 sq ft house. “I had studied in the Tamil medium initially and in Coimbatore, the school headmaster, my father’s friend asked my dad if I was to be admitted in Tamil or English medium, and my dad said, English, of course. In retrospect, I am glad he did because it makes you eligible to participate in a larger world,” recalls Venkat.
Unique balance
He recalls his grandmother would buy yards of the same cloth and make skirts for his sister and shirts for his older brother and him, and they would get teased to no end by their friends. “It was tough love,” recalls Venkat with a smile.
His later years in school saw him tinkering with assembled radios — ‘the joy was to keep tuning it till it suddenly caught a signal” — which ignited a passion for electronics engineering. However, he didn’t get admission to this course and settled for a BSc in Maths, followed by a year of CA, which bored him. He joined Sarabhai in Mumbai and the following year a bunch from the company wrote and cracked the CAT. Venkat earned his MBA from IIM-A in 1985 and moved to join advertising firm MAA in Bengaluru as his parents were alone there. Though, Bengaluru then was the “backwaters for a corporate career,” he says. He met his future wife, Bharati, in MAA.
Then Venkat joined Mudra as it was being set up where he was accounts supervisor and R Balki, who later would be an acclaimed filmmaker, was copy writer. “We had no business. I used to sit pillion on my boss, R Sridhar’s TVS Suzuki and we would go round with layouts and pitch it to clients saying we have a campaign for you, but I soon got fed up with this,” he recalls.
Talk about serendipity. On October 30, 1989, his birthday, an ad appeared for an ad manager for Titan. The profile matched, an ad agency background, an MBA et al and in late ’89, Venkat joined Titan, little knowing that he would spend the next 35 years in the company.
Though Venkat heads a large consumer products company, with a clutch of luxury brands, he himself remains grounded in the middle-class ethos he grew up in. To most places, he still travels by train like the Great Indian travelling public, eats roadside stuff in remote places. He still lives in the LIC colony where the family bought a house 25 years ago. “We only upgraded to a larger house in the same colony,” he explains. We ask him if that ethos does not militate against his role of being the chief of a company that markets some high-end luxury brands?
It’s an interesting conundrum, he says thoughtfully. “Zoya, for example, I was at the centre of creation of the brand. But I find it perfectly fine as my discrimination and refinement for choosing the right standards for Zoya are quite different from my lifestyle. It is not hampered by what I do or how I live,” he elaborates.
Global ambitions
We take the conversation global and ask Venkat about Titan’s international foray and re-entry into the US market a few years ago. After Titan’s disastrous foray into nine European countries in the 1990s, it withdrew, stung. In the 2000s it again forayed with Tanishq into the US market in a calibrated way, but again shut down. We ask Venkat why he thinks this time Titan has got it right?
Venkat is ruminative when he says that an important difference between what it did in 2008 and now is that in the earlier foray, it targeted white Americans and Hispanics. “The feeling was that the next gen Indian in America would have become assimilated. We thought that there would no longer be an NRI market for and a brand like Tanishq which was wrong in hindsight.”
But with so many brands in the US market, it couldn’t get enough Americans to walk into the store. “And the money that we needed to spend to get them into the stores was looking really large. And Lehman happened,” recalls Venkat. Tanishq then withdrew from the US market.
However, now, much has changed. Tanishq is going after the diaspora. Indians in the 2020s are very different, he explains. Indian CEOs have made strides in the US, the community is sitting on greater wealth and there’s a newfound confidence in one’s Indianness. “It’s a huge difference now and its showing. Our ambition is high for jewellery; we want white Americans and Hispanics also to flock to our stores,” adds Venkat. Tanishq has 14 stores outside India, four of them in the US.
By now, we’ve polished off our breakfast and are having our coffee while Venkat is nursing his one black coffee. We’re sitting outdoors and there’s a gentle breeze swirling around; mornings in Bengaluru are still cool. We ask Venkat what’s turbo charged Titan the past few years that revenues and m-cap have soared.
The first thing is that some 20 people came into new roles and six CEOs were new, he says. So are the CFO and the CTO. “Some are new to the company, some new to the role. So, they brought a freshness to the job,” he explains. Covid brought agility and the company also transformed digitally. It also restructured, creating an international business division. “The average age across the company also dropped; each CEO wants to contribute; the multiplier effect of all that effort is showing now,” he elaborates, adding too that the growth in the Indian business environment too has contributed in no small way.
While many joke that Titan is now a jewellery company with a watch business attached, it’s Titan’s initial and instant success in watches that gave it the impetus to launch jewellery. We ask Venkat, who has around 20 watches in his collection, what the future of the analogue wristwatch is. “It’s in the hands of the industry and we are doing a good job to keep the meaning of the wristwatch alive. That meaning is the mood of the day; does the watch reflect that and the dress of the day. The analogue watch is an accessory, a symbol of self-expression and a status symbol,” he elaborates.
Beyond work
So what does Venkat do when he’s not breathing Titan? Singing, of course, pat comes the response. He loves belting out old Kishore, Rafi and Hemant Kumar numbers and contemporary Tamil movie songs as well. An avid cyclist as well, he used to cycle to work earlier and that keeps him fit as a fiddle. And, cooking, of course, for the family. Sundays are the day he’s in the kitchen, cooking up a storm for his wife and two daughters, one of whom is now studying in the US. When his term as MD ends in December 2025, he wants to take up some serious farming at his two-acre farm near Krishnagiri, he says. Now, bananas and coconuts trees are flourishing there. Venkat’s interests are varied and that also includes Tamil literature. A few years ago, he collaborated with another person, Bombay Kannan, to produce a 78-hour audio book on Ponniyin Selvan, which was later made into a hit movie by Mani Ratnam.
Running Titan and its multifarious businesses must be a stressful job and how does he handle that is a question we put to him. “I make a distinction between pressure and stress. I feel people use these terms interchangeably without realising they are not the same. There’s a famous poster in our industry: ‘No pressure, no diamonds’. Pressure actually brings out the best in you. When somebody says, too much pressure, they mean stress. Pressure is a good thing. But, if you let that pressure affect you it means you are worrying about failure and that creates a negative cycle of anxiety,” he elaborates. On that philosophical note, we bid goodbye to Venkat to deal with another day at Titan and its multiple blockbuster brands.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
