Part II · Chapter 23
The NRI Playbook
What can an Indian living abroad build from the gap between what India makes and what the shops around them sell? This chapter is for NRIs in the Gulf, North America, Britain, Europe, Singapore and Australia, and for Indian manufacturers looking for a partner inside a foreign market. It opens with a Rajkot ceramics maker and an engineer near Toronto who each hold half of one business without ever having met. It sets out the business as one circuit with an Indian end and a destination end, describes what sells in each of five regional lanes, and proposes an order for entering diaspora markets, starting where Indians are most concentrated and the rules are lightest. Drawing on a heritage saree house, it explains how the diaspora actually buys, through trust, occasions, touch and a range edited for each country. It closes on a lighter model in which you connect others rather than ship goods yourself. Afterwards you can judge where your own residence gives you an edge, and which market to enter first.
Key ideas
- For an NRI the usual difficulty of exporting is inverted: knowing the foreign shopper comes with residence, so the learning curve shifts to Indian factories, quality control and freight.
- Diaspora markets differ more than the shared label suggests, so the choice of first territory sets the price of everything learnt after it.
- For goods people want to touch, a diaspora shop still earns its rent, and it works best beside the temples and community centres where buyers already gather.