It's all about attitude! your bag, your jewellery, your t-shirt, all are about sporting your attitude. Circa 2004, attitude defines a brand. And design creates attitude (think iMac, Alienworks, Hugo Boss). Design is about style, ease of use, new materials and colours; different combinations of these create new products. Design can also mean lower costs, perhaps, versatility in use. However you see it, until recently, no one in their right minds spoke of design and India in the same breath. Indian designers either headed Westwards (think Anand Jon) or morphed into lone rangers working on one-off projects. Those that managed to secure employment in companies were put to work on reverse engineering products or simply tinkering with designs inspired (read borrowed) from companies and designers elsewhere in the world. Today, all that is beginning to change.

"The idea is to pick up nascent trends from street fashion," says Michael Foley, the head designer of Titan's Fastrack range. "Fastrack is targeted at people who are experimental, aware of trends, fashionable and not skewed towards a global brand. Our boys' fashions pick up roots from music, sports, formula one and technology; girls' fashions from accesorising-for example denim is back so we make things that go with denim."

This isn't an aberration, as even a cursory exploration of shop windows will prove. The market abounds with a clutch of made-in-India designs: lifestyle products, jewellery and backpacks. One Indian company makes stretchers that could well be the best-designed in the world. And the country hasn't even begun to tap its treasure trove of traditional design.

Sling Your Attitude
Made-in-India Footloose backpacks are vying with Jansport and Trunk & Co. offerings for mindspace.

Footloose bags: Orange and black. Think basketball

It helps that the primary market for backpacks thinks Footloose is, like most other edgy offerings of the ilk available, an international brand. Actually, the brand is owned by Indian luggage maker VIP. The company sells Footloose bags through outlets on campuses, music chains Planet M and Music World, other similar hotspots, and the luggage maker's existing channels (although discontinuing the last won't be such a bad idea given the rucksack's edgy image).

The design of Footloose was a course project for National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) student, Dhirendra Kharka. His peers didn't find the idea of working a project for VIP hot, but Kharka spotted a mass-market opportunity. His inspiration came from the NIFT basketball court and his original name for the line was Slam. "Basketball is truly international, attractive, and vibrant and translates into the aspirations of the global youth," says Kharka.

VIP followed up Kharka's design idea with an equally innovative communication one: its commercials featured a Footloose meter that measures the footloose level of people. Sudhir Jatia, the managing director of the company, claims the sales of the Footloose range are growing at around 70 per cent. The emphasis on design and marketing has helped. Today, Footloose stands head and shoulders above local competitors and rubs shoulders with the likes of Jansport in its targest audience's mindspace. Better still, export orders are pouring in from Europe and West Asia. And to think it started with a student-project that not too many people wanted.

Magppie wars: Designer Sahdev holds a bowling ball bucket and a ninepin-like cocktail shaker

Style In Steel
Think minimal, think steel, think Indian.

Steel is now officially a fashion statement in India. And one company from Delhi's Wazirpur Industrial Area can stake claim to some of the credit for bringing an emerging Western fashion trend to India. Magppie is the name of the company, and it started life as just another steel sheet fabricator in the dingy bylanes of the borough. Then, on a visit to Germany, the youngest of the Jain brothers who run Magppie, Vinod Jain, visited the Ambiente Exhibition; Vinod knew a good thing when he saw it and realised that the company could achieve a great deal more through the design route. Today, Magppie's range of salad bowls, ice buckets candle stands, tape dispensers, cocktail shakers and serving spoons are all the rage. Most of these have been designed by Kunal Sahdev, an accessories designer from NIFT who stumbled onto the wonders that be wrought with steel on a visit to Magppie's production facility (his personal favourites are a cocktail shaker and ice bucket inspired by bowling). The results were almost instantaneous: export-orders soared. Today, 90 per cent of Magppie's Rs 50 crore revenues come from exports.

In 2002, convinced that there was a domestic market for its products, Magppie went in for an India-launch. At the time, it boasted a range of 14 products; today, the number is over 150. The company adds around 100 designs every six months. There's more than just the fashion-factor involved here: it takes between six and eight months for a competitor to clone a Magppie product; by the time the imitations hit the market, the company is on to the next thing.

Fashion, Not Only For The Wrist
Carry the street fashion design to accessories too.

Fastrack: Watches for late teens too

...Fasttrack: Steel and plastic jewellery

Fine, steel is a fashion statement in products like cocktail shakers and salad bowls, but jewellery? And how about mixing some new age materials, notably plastics, with the steel, for some incremental edginess?

Watch major Titan is doing just that with its Fastrack range. Originally launched as a watch range targeting late teens (this was in the late 1990s), Fastrack has built a reputation for the innovative use of steel mixed with materials as diverse as carbon fibre, canvas, silicon, even polyurethane. The jewellery is an extension of that; Titan has test-launched a range of jewellery under the Fastrack brand that uses a mix of steel and translucent plastic.

The design proposition: strong geometric lines that are making a comeback in everything from handbags to shoes to cars.

Fastrack designer Michael Foley is quick to point out that steel-and-plastic won't be the only theme. Street fashion, he clarifies, is the driver, much like in any part of the world. On the cards are Fastrack collections made of materials like leather. "The materials will be commonplace but the interpretations will make the difference," explains Foley.

After five years of existence, Fastrack is still only a Rs 25-30 crore brand. "We floundered a bit but have got the pricing right now," says Manoj Tadepalli, the brand's manager. The watches are priced between Rs 750 and Rs 2,500. The jewellery is priced between Rs 70 and Rs 350. That makes Fastrack about as expensive as junk jewellery, but Titan is hoping the design will set it apart. Tadepalli believes Fastrack can be a Rs 100 crore brand soon. The company's unusual promotions for Fastrack include three-minute movies on the brand produced by students of the local college. That's a good way to sell street-fashion.

New-age stretcher: Made of aluminium composite

Safe And Light
Tilak Lodh's new-age medical equipment is both.

Attribute HDD India's new-age designs for medical equipment (not the scanner or ultrasound-type, but stretchers and the like) to founder Tilak Lodh's education and family-background. Tilak went to National Institute of Design, India's best design school, and his brother was in the air-rescue business. Tilak heard horror stories about how a patient's problems often got aggravated during transit and was appalled at "the lack of value for human life in India." Then came the chance meeting with an army general at a medical equipment exhibition.

Learning of Tilak's interest, the general showed him a prototype stretcher, part of an imported trauma care kit from the US and challenged him to replicate it. Tilak did one better: he improved on the original not only in terms of finish, but also reduced the stretchers weight by three kilogrammes to to 7.5 kilos. The secret: an aluminium composite exclusively developed for this purpose by an Indian metals major. HDD's air-lift stretcher is multipurpose: it can be fitted with skis and dragged along on snow, and its sides can be folded up to ensure that it does not hit against rock sides when hauled up.

Tilak has also designed an aluminium Scoop Stretcher for Apollo Hospitals. The Scoop's frame is constructed in two halves. Uncoupled, the halves slide under the patient; recoupled, the stretcher lifts the patient. Impressed by HDD's designs, the US Army has approached the company for stretchers. However, Tilak hasn't followed up: his business is capital-intensive and hdd's strength is design.