A New Catalogue from India’s Top Woodworking Tools Maker

New Catalogue

When I heard that Shobha Industries, the country’s top woodworking tools maker, had come out with a new catalogue, I was intrigued. Did it mean new tools? A new approach perhaps? So, I asked Agnay Chuttani, the company’s managing director, what prompted the new catalogue? He said it was primarily to provide customers with more information that would help them select the right tools. They have also upgraded their website (www.shobha-india.com/) to make it more informative and easier to navigate.

The catalogue was pretty good but there were no new tools, except for the router planes which have been missing from the Indian market. When I needed one some years ago, I had no choice but to get one from Veritas which proved pretty expensive. Now I see that Shobha has two router planes in their catalogue one of which looks pretty similar to the Veritas model. Then there are a lot of shoilder planes and vices I had not seen them stock earlier. I would have been happier though if their catalogue and website had some pricing information which is totally absent.

Soba Router Plane

Clearly the company believes that India is a growing market and they are paying more attention to it. Though Shobha has grown almost entirely on account of successful exports to western markets, Chuttani says “India has a huge potential and we are now equally keen to serve India as a priority.”

The company continues to focus on the export market. For, as Chuttani says, the company “has received an excellent response from our distributors around the world. We have been exporting tools since a long time now and establishing the line of woodworking tools parallel to the product range we were already selling has been easier as we had built up trust in our customers in terms of quality and deliveries.”

“We always ask our customers for feedback on the products we supply to them and have open house days at our distributors where actual users are invited to give us feedback on our products. Small suggestions from a user can result in great improvements and technical upgradation of the product. Also, we have developed software in-house which helps us constantly improve our production processes,” says Chuttani, adding that today he feels their tools are at par with any leading American, Japanese or Chinese companies.

Soba Shoulder Plane

The company initially started by mainly exporting hand planes which remains their strength but innovated and branched into other hand tools manufacture. Hand planes, block planes, and spoke shaves remain their most popular products.

When I told him about some complaints Indian woodworkers had expressed about the quality of some of their products, Chuttani dismissed them, arguing: “Our products have great ratings abroad and it is not genuinely possible that the same product is not good here. We still look into the complaints in the Indian market but feel it is just competition trying to scare us in order to enter the Indian scene.”

He maintains that his company’s strength is their in-house expertise and insistence on quality control. “We as a company are quality driven and customer satisfaction is our primary goal. We completely finish the products ourselves. The raw material is bought and the complete product is finished in-house. This is our strength which is backed by a strong skilled work force of which we are justifiably proud of.”

Agnay Chuttani, who travels the world promoting his tools and gathering feedback from re-sellers, is upbeat about the Indian market, a reason for the new catalogue. “Our people always looking for a great quality tools at reasonable prices”, he says. “And as a next step, we are working on new tools development for wood working and metal working as well as establishing our brand in India.”

Indranil Banerjie
November 2024