This man loves Valentine’s Day – and Ram Sene

Marketers of mushy cards and romantic dinners fear the party-poopers but,contrarily,Karuturi is sounding almost jaunty. “Those people are my best friends,” he says,“They have succeeded in marketing Valentine’s Day and gifting roses to a lot of people who knew nothing about it.”

As a result,Karuturi expects many young Indians to defy the threats of the Sri Ram Sene and other groups and gift roses to their loved ones. These groups will just end up encouraging youth to defy the ridiculous bullying,says Karuturi and asks,“So who is complaining?”

Karuturi produces half-a-billion stems each year. The Bangalore-based company with rose farms in India,Kenya and Ethiopia will have $125 million (about 600 crore rupees) in sales revenue this year.

And yet,sales in India barely touch 50 million stems annually.

Many Western makers of everything from deodorants to sports shoes drool over the potential of India’s under-exploited market of urban,middle-class consumers whose aspirations appear to be tagged to Western tastes.

Karuturi,an engineering graduate from Bangalore with an MBA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland,Ohio,is an Indian who wants to sell the Westernized concept of gifting roses to that very demographic.

The potential Indian market,in Karuturi’s estimate,would consume at least 500 million roses a year. “There are young consumers with a willingness to spend,” he says.

Accordingly,the company has launched a Mail-a-Bouquet service for Valentine’s Day with the logistics company TNT as its partner. Last year,there were 1,000 deliveries. This year’s rose-with-pearl pendant offering has already been ordered 5,000 times and the company hopes to have 7,000 orders by the end of the season.

The economic recession may be a blessing in disguise for Karuturi. After all,impulse purchases in sectors such as cigarettes and chewing gum — and roses — are usually not affected by economic downturns as much as big ticket consumables.

Karuturi,who divides his time between Bangalore and Addis Ababa,is busy marketing roses as a “feel good,low-ticket,high-emotional quotient product.”

Those buying the pitch are wealth management divisions of private sector banks,telecom providers of services such as Blackberry,and credit card companies for their gold and platinum card customers. “We want to grow the customer relationship management market with our offering,” he says.

The company will supply roses as a customer goodwill solution to large financial businesses in India this year. But client confidentiality requires that the name and the size of the order remain undisclosed.

Karuturi Global has 22 outlets in southern India and will launch their flower retail brand FlowerExpress in Delhi this month and Mumbai next quarter. The target is to have 100 Indian retail outlets by 2010,and add another 100 by 2012 with at least 50 in the Middle East.

As the Valentine’s Day hubbub demonstrates,many still think public displays of affection and gifting roses are Westernized concepts. But Karuturi asserts that he is still to encounter anybody who has frowned upon a gift of Karuturi roses. “After all,we sell happiness,not roses,” he says persuasively.