Martha Stewart backs India outsourcing as companies rethink China supply chains

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Indian business & finance myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

Homemaking entrepreneur Martha Stewart has praised India’s capability as a textile manufacturing hub and contrasted it with the difficulty of producing goods in China, as pandemic-era disruptions and political tensions between Washington and Beijing prompt US businesses to rethink their supply chains.

“[The] supply chain has been difficult through Covid . . . China became more and more difficult to do business in,” the style guru told the Financial Times during a factory tour of her sole Indian supplier, Welspun Living. “And India is an extraordinary country . . . this is a nice fit.”

Since lockdowns in China caused severe supply chain disruption, international companies have tried to reduce their reliance on “the world’s factory”. The so-called China-plus-one shift has given low-cost India a chance to increase its share of global manufacturing in products ranging from bed linen to Apple’s iPhones.

While much of Stewart’s eponymous homewares range, including kitchen knives and cooking pots, are still made in China, the lifestyle entrepreneur hinted that could change: “We have a few things being done still in China, but gradually you have to revisit each contract . . . with a business like mine, it changes.”

Stewart also alluded to trade tensions between Washington and Beijing as one of the factors encouraging companies to shift sourcing away from China.

“There’s a certain amount of unfriendliness, and we don’t want to get mixed up in that,” said Stewart, who is part of the leadership team at US marketer Marquee Brands, which acquired the Martha Stewart media and merchandising operations in 2019. “Politics is not part of our business. We want excellent manufacturing, we want excellent deliveries, we want no hold-ups.”

Towels and bed linen carrying her name have been produced exclusively by Welspun since 2019, predating the pandemic and sanctions. “What’s been manufactured for us in the last few years is excellent,” Stewart said.

Companies such as Welspun are at the heart of New Delhi’s “Make in India” exports drive, supplying US retailers such as Macy’s and Walmart. Welspun can produce 1mn towels a day across two automated factories. Most of the goods are destined for the US market.

The company has bounced back from its own supply chain disaster. A 2016 scandal involved sheets mislabelled as Egyptian cotton made by Welspun and sold by retailer Target in the US.

Indian textiles got an extra boost in 2021 when a US ban came into force on products from Xinjiang, China’s biggest cotton-producing region. Washington alleges people from the region’s Uyghur minority are victims of forced labour.

“The Xinjiang cotton [ban] was a very challenging time for China, and it has definitely put the whole cotton supply chain focus on India,” said Dipali Goenka, chief executive and managing director of Welspun Living. But Indian textile makers still face stiff competition from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Pakistan, she added.

Indian manufacturing also continues to lack scale compared with China. Stewart said she was not expecting to redirect her supply chain entirely to India. “I don’t think they have every single capability of the things that we make,” she said.

Stewart, whose supply chain has wound through China, Vietnam, Brazil and Egypt over the years, remarked that she “would like to see some of [the manufacturing] come back to the United States”, adding that when she started selling soft goods in the 1980s, many of the suppliers were in her home country.