| Customer | A legacy Indian fan brand |
| Working together since | 2017 |
| Problems brought to us | Peak-season short supply; inability to consolidate freight from one OEM |
| What changed | Forecast-led pre-build with written consent; range widened to fill a truck from one gate |
| Measured result | 4–5% of landed cost saved on freight consolidation |
When a brand reviews its fan OEM, the conversation is almost always about the per-unit price. That is an incomplete conversation. Two costs sit outside that number, and both are usually larger than the margin being argued over: the sale you lose when a supplier misses the summer, and the freight you overpay when your range comes from four different factories.
A legacy Indian fan brand had paid both before they started working with us in 2017.
Problem one: everybody’s peak is the same peak
Fan demand in India does not rise gently. It concentrates into a few months, and every OEM’s order book inflates at the same moment — which is precisely when capacity is scarcest.
The industry’s failure mode here is well known and rarely admitted. An OEM accepts the peak order because refusing it puts the account at risk, then delivers a fraction of it. The brand is told in April what it needed to know in January.
The visible cost is the lost sale. The real cost is the counter. A retailer who asks for stock twice in peak season and doesn’t get it fills that shelf with a competitor — and does not necessarily give it back in October. Distribution is slow to win and quick to lose, and a season of short supply can cost a brand counters it spent years opening.
That was the first thing the brand told us they wanted solved.
Problem two: a full truck needs a wide range
The brand sells through a pan-India network and wanted to dispatch direct from factory to distributor, taking the depot leg out of the chain. Structurally the right call — it removes a handling step, a rental and a delay.
It only works if one factory can fill a truck with the mix a distributor actually orders.
Most fan OEMs are specialists. A plastic-body TPW supplier cannot ship metal-body fans; a metal-fan supplier cannot ship ventilation. So the brand is left choosing between part-loads from several factories — which gives back the consolidation saving that justified direct dispatch in the first place — or routing everything through a depot and keeping the cost it was trying to remove.
Neither is a scheduling problem. It is a portfolio problem.
What we did: forecast, then build ahead — with written consent
By the end of our second year we had two complete seasonal cycles of the brand’s actual offtake with us: peak and off-peak, model by model. That is enough history to forecast from rather than guess at.
We took the forecast to them and asked for explicit written consent to build ahead — to manufacture and hold finished, branded stock in our warehouse before their purchase orders arrived.
That consent is not a formality and we do not proceed without it. Pre-building branded inventory on a forecast is our working capital and our risk: if the forecast is wrong, we hold the stock. What the brand gets in exchange is a buffer that already exists when the season turns, so a peak order draws down finished goods instead of joining a queue behind every other customer’s peak order.
What we did: widen the range so the truck fills from one gate
The second problem needed product, not planning. Working directly with the brand’s promoters, we widened the range deliberately rather than opportunistically, building out:
- Table, pedestal and wall fans across all variants — plastic bodies with multiple motor and blade options
- metal-blade fans
- 18-inch fans
- ventilation fans
A distributor’s mixed order can now be consolidated and loaded from a single location. That is worth 4–5% of landed cost to the brand.
Worth being precise about what kind of saving that is. It is not a negotiated discount, which has to be re-won every year and comes out of someone’s margin. It comes from the truck being full. It recurs by itself, and it does not depend on us quoting thinner.
Where it stands
Both problems were materially addressed inside the first 24 months. Nine years on, the forecast-and-hold arrangement runs each season on renewed consent, and the consolidated range ships direct from our plant at IDA Bollaram.
What this does and doesn’t demonstrate
It does not show that we are the cheapest fan per unit. We often aren’t.
What it shows is that two of a fan brand’s largest supply costs are not in the per-unit price at all — they are in reliability through the peak, and in how many factories your range has to come from. A supplier who is three per cent cheaper and misses March is not cheaper.
It also shows the limit of the arrangement. The pre-build buffer requires trust running both ways: the brand has to give us a forecast worth acting on, and we have to carry stock we haven’t been paid for. That took two seasons of trading history before either side was willing.
If either problem sounds like yours
The conversation worth having is about your seasonal curve and your range width, not about price per piece. Tell us what your peak looks like and what your distributors order together, and we will tell you what we can consolidate. Start that conversation, or call +91 9177 068 845.