Gita Ram (Co-founder)
Gita Ram, co-founder, craft activist, mentors the company, and has been its principal social investor providing it with loans of upto 150,000 USD without collateral, at less than market interest. She is the leading light in Industrees quest to uphold a tradition of volunteerism. This is essential to keep the balance of this venture that hopes to benefit the economically under privileged, through a for profit enterprise where often the discrepancies of free market wages, between urban management and rural producers can be quite extreme.
Raminder Singh Rekhi (CEO)
Raminder Singh Rekhi, has over 13 years of exposure to rural enterprise development, forging marketing linkages, supply chain management, sourcing, logistics, vendor development, media management etc. This involved community mobilization, training, empowerment and capacity building etc. During his stint with Pantaloon Retail India Ltd, Raminder had been instrumental in the opening of 12 new stores totalling 3,78,000 sq. ft. (Prior to Jun 01 Pantaloons had just one store of 12,500 sqt) and increasing turnovers from Rs.20 crores to Rs.250 crores. |
Mother Earth believes in providing you with great quality goods while nurturing the environment and building on the strengths of marginalised rural communities to create sustainable livelihoods and overall prosperity. Mother Earth is a new brand of domestic retail chain stores starting with 11,000 sq ft large flagship store in Bangalore. It is a social brand that offers the consumers the best of the Indian natural hand crafted products while simultaneously providing livelihoods to the rural artisans and labourers of India.
Mother Earth was born out of Industree and is a design led brand that worked with natural fibres for over 15 years in retail, and exports operating out of Bangalore. Industree scaled up and broadened it's products to include garments (woven, embellished and stitched by SHGs or rural artisans), food (organic and natural) and a wider range of home linen as well as a large range of handicraft decor, furniture and gift items.
We have also got investment from Future group (Big Bazaar, Central, Home Town etc)and have in shop presence in other Pantaloon outlets like Home Town and Ethnicity. We plan to have about 40 stores operational in 5 years and one store each month from March 2009. Simultaneously we are looking at suppliers preferably artisans, NGOs or cooperatives or fair trade organisations with whom we can tie up with.
Contact Information
Phone No: +91 (80) 65472291,65472292 |
