Our Customer Stories
Port of Trust has been diligently delivering sustainable value to the clients, creating lasting relationships across Europe, Australia, and the US. Our luminary customers share their stories. You may read how businesses like yours found solutions with Port of Trust.
Tikau has been working with India for the last 10 years. We work with artisan communities in rural India with a spread from Kashmiri artisans to bamboo weavers in Odhisa and carpet weavers in Kutch. Port of Trust has been our partner in India for the last 7 years helping make our work with artisans more effective. Their help with banking, logistics and quality control and artisan cluster capacity building has ensured that we now are able to concentrate on the sales end knowing that our work in India is in safe hands. Despite the involvement of Port of Trust, we are still able to maintain direct contact with artisans and stay true to our principles of ensuring that as Tikau becomes a stronger brand, the benefits of our brand percolate down to the individual artisan.
In 2014, we reached out to Port of Trust to see if he could help make possible a super urgent delivery for a 40 ft container of towels. Since it was a well selling in-house brand, we had to be sure that there would be no compromise on quality given that there was no time for us to approve samples at each stage. The goods were shipped to us in a record time of 3 weeks from sample to shipment. Ever since we have done some major towel programs using Port of Trust factories while also adding cushions, throws, carpets and quilt covers to our collection from India. As against 2014 when 2% of our imports came from India, today we buy as much as 18% of our supplies from the country. It truly has been a win-win partnership for both companies involved.
Ours is a specialist product. While not being a high value product, it is especially demanding in terms of quality specifications since we use the pads on our machines and even a slight variance in the product can result in a catastrophe during our work. While earlier we had to pre inspect each pad before it was sold to our distributors, for the last 9 years we have not had any issue with the thousands of pads that we have bought from India.
India was never on our sourcing itinerary since as a premium brand we could afford to buy from European based suppliers in Turkey, Portugal, Belgium or Estonia. That was until Sanjay and Ganesh dropped in to say hello. 4 years later we see our interactions and engagements growing and today a growing number of items ranging from bed linen to kitchen textiles and accessories, toys to recycled floor coverings are shipped to us from India. Our confidence is growing and despite some early setbacks and challenging times, we know with Port of Trust as our sourcing partner we are in safe hands.
Ours is a patented technology backed by years of cutting edge research. We were seeking to partner with companies in India but were wary of straying into discussions and disclosures which could compromise our proprietary knowledge. In order to help us build partnerships with ethical companies, we sought Port of Trust’s assistance. We have subsequently visited India and given our interactions and a better understanding of the country and the industrial climate, we feel that very soon our efforts will bear very positive results in the spirit of true partnership.