Vanduta Khurana, President of Delhi-based Daks India, which currently employs a workforce of 2,000 and produces 10 lakh textile products annually, including apparel and home textile, was invited to be the keynote speaker at the World Communication Forum, Davos, making the textile community of India proud.
Addressing the forum on the subject Social Media Offline, she introduced N2-X, the company’s brand, constructed as a tool of expression. The product, in fact, is a bag, the canvas of which is the ‘media’ and the exchangeable badges, or as the company calls them, ‘stamps’, is the content. The product could have several manifestations…It could be a simple school bag, Bow & Arrow case, an iPad, a smartphone cover etc.
“The product is the world’s first mobile re-configurable surface, which can take the shape of whatever the user wants it to be. It is already available at the Ali Virgin Stores in Middle East & UAE, and will soon be sold by one of the biggest companies in the US,” informs Vanduta.
Sharing her experience of this achievement with Apparel Resources, she said, “Our lives are an expression of who we are. This need to express oneself is very human. Technology, art, science, colour, media and language have made communication easier, but expression still remains a challenge. In fact, more so now than ever before. I am part of the world of textiles and fashion for the past 21 years. Along the way, we realized that we were not manufacturing garments, but tools of expression, even if passive. With our bag, you could be a conformist or a rebel; you could be a monk or a pleasure-seeker; perhaps a lady carrying a well-made bag or a boy wearing a well-stitched shirt, both want to subtly convey that they appreciate quality and are ready to work hard for it. We needed to take this forward… We needed now to create a more vibrant, flexible, evolutionary, artistic pictorial space… a canvas. People needed to talk to each other, not just through texting on their smart phones.”
Sharing the idea behind the product, Vanduta said that Sean Christian, a friend and brilliant scientist, Anil Khurana (her husband) and she together brainstormed and created this canvas, a platform on which one could express themselves. Dhruv, her son, who studies at Tufts University, Boston knows how to be one with technology and the social media, so he helped base the brand around the social media concept, but made it mobile re-configurable and personalised.
