Burnin’ brand

A winner of two coveted Prime Minister Awards in 2002 for Most Innovative Company and Most Innovative Product, is sufficient indication for Saffire’s managing director, Vishnu Tewari that their locally manufactured brand is well on its way to becoming a household name.

The company was first formed in 1996 by Tewari, a former Director of Consolidated Appliances Limited (Consol), the most popular local manufacturers’ of household appliances at the time.

Consol had actually closed off its manufacturing department and Tewari decided to hire the displaced workers.

Feeling the need to carve his own niche, Tewari said he saw his long-term plan of owning his own brand-name company materialise in less than a decade.

A manufacturing plant was built at the O’Meara Industrial Estate, Arima for the manufacturing process and the stoves were sold under a sizzling new brand, “Saffire.”

In an interview last week, he said that the plant had all the relevant equipment for pressing, cutting and assemblage of the stoves, noting that about 20 percent of the components are made in Arima, while the other 80 percent came from Italy.

This Italian company, Fox Bompani, was actually the name of the company that Tewari had dealt with while he had been working for Consol, so he found it beneficial to maintain this business relationship.

“In the beginning it was difficult, especially within the first two to three years to get a new local brand name that nobody had heard of out there. We had to do a lot of promotion and marketing, we advertised on the radio and interacted with people more,” he said in a soft tone.

It was even more difficult to secure financial support, he said, since his bank thought the idea for this type of company, with Consol already on the market, was ridiculous.

Tewari, said he had to turn to other alternative sources. Needless to say, the company has proven its detractors wrong.

MARKET GAINER

Now Saffire supplies stoves to all the major appliance stores, said Tewari, and as a result must compete with imported stoves as well. Tewari said that his major competitor remains Consol and believed that his company has bitten off a chunk of their market.

The 12 models of Saffire stoves are available in black, white and stainless steel and prices range from about $2,300 to $7,000. “Our prices are very competitive and we design the units to conform to local cooking habits, removing all unnecessary features that may be impractical.”

For instance, Saffire was the first to introduce and patent the world’s only “rat-proof stove,” or its unique “spillage deflector device.”

For those who use their stoves on a daily basis, these innovations are priceless.

The rat-proof stove as Tewari calls it, came on the scene when the company was still small. The idea emerged from his customers, who constantly complained that a major problem they had with their stoves was, in fact, rodents.

Stoves, he said, are the number-one home appliance that these pests colonise because of their cosiness and warmth, especially in the rainy season. “Mice will leave the outdoors, and they go into the gas-stoves, eat into the fibre glass and the stoves end up in a mess,” he explained.

His company’s research had discovered that this was a major problem throughout the Caribbean region. So Saffire implemented an improved unit, applying additional protective material on certain strategic points of their stoves, to deter the rodents from entering. The spill deflector prevents overflowing food from clogging the stove’s jets and corrupting the stove.

Saffire, he boasted, is the only company that he knows that has come up with such innovations that have been patented and received their just due of rewards.

He explained that the Trinidad market usually goes for 20- inch, 24-inch, 30- inch and 36-inch stoves. As he sees it, Tewari said Saffire has about 90 percent of the 36-inch stove market share while it has about 50 percent of the 24-inch stove market share.

Tewari said the company is currently in the process of introducing a 30-inch stove, which should hit the stores in February.

REGIONAL EXPORT

While Saffire advertises in the daily newspapers, Tewari said he sees the value of interacting personally with his customers as being priceless. “Our sales representatives do promotional work in all the stores, where our stoves are sold,” he said. These stores include Singer, Fen Mohammed, Standards and Courts.

The company, an active member of the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers’ Association (TTMA), also participates at various trade shows promoting its product and boosting sales. It is this train of forward thinking that has propelled the company to where it is in the market today. Sales itself within Trinidad are distributed unevenly: he estimates that about 50% of their sales go to the Central region, 25% to South, 15% in the north and about 10% in Tobago.

Saffire has no middlemen: The company does its own business transactions and transports its stoves directly to the stores it supplies.

His customer base, he said, included all income brackets although he did observe some specific purchasing trends.

The lower income bracket might be attracted to the lower-costing 24-inch stoves while the much larger, 36-inch stainless steel ones tend to be bought by the upper and middle-class income bracket, he said.

“In 2007, we sold 6000 stoves,” he said. Out of that number, 4, 500 stoves were absorbed locally while about 1, 500 were exported to the Caricom countries where Grenada was the top buyer followed by Barbados. He attributed the high number of stove sales in Grenada to the unfortunate effects of Hurricane Ivan that had hit the island a few years back. Since then, Saffire was able to gain considerable ground through the Singer Company in Grenada.

He added that the company was currently trying to penetrate the Guyanese, Surinamese and Jamaican markets.

However, since Jamaica had adopted the American standard for their stove manufacturers, whereas most of the Caribbean islands were using the European standard, supplies to that island was made more difficult and Saffire was now required to retool its stoves.

His staff, he said, usually comprised of 15 permanent workers but explained as the business was seasonal — 75% of sales done during the last four months of the year — there was a temporary work-force of about 30 workers.

DEMAND BURNING

The demand for stoves has increased rapidly since he began manufacturing operations in 2001. “We moved from none to 6,000,” said Tewari. He attributed this demand to the fact that people had been building and selling more houses over the past few years. Every year, he said he intended to keep extending the product range and innovating for his customers.

Another major reason for Saffire’s success, according to Tewari, is because of its great emphasis on customer-service. “We have an immediate response line, where customers can call us for 24 hours of the day, seven days a week.” Additionally, he said that all their stoves came with a one year warranty, and the necessary parts were stocked at their factory. He said that when one of Saffire’s staff was called to repair or service one of its stoves, it was the company’s policy to communicate with the customer the day afterwards to ensure that the services were up to standard through calls or text messages. Saffire has also been hurt by the rising crime.

As manufacturers, he said some of the challenges facing them were the difficulty of gaining access to manpower labour. “It appears that nobody wants to work a second and third shift,” he said.

He said that this problem was greatly limiting his ability to increase the production of more stoves.

“So you may find the demand is there, but you can’t supply it ” he said.