Twenty-five years down the line, Lal continues to go by her mantra of an entrepreneurial response to personal need and customer demand
Image: Good Earth
Her excitement is child-like, almost infectious. “Did you hear the Good Earth Flashback25 playlist on Spotify? It plays all the songs I played at my first store in Kemps Corner 25 years ago,” says Anita Lal, the 72-year-old owner of lifestyle and luxury store Good Earth, on the phone.
I immediately get on to the list to find ‘The peanut vendor’, a Mambo number by Cuban music composer Perez Prado, ‘Hum aapki ankhon mein’, a popular song from Bollywood movie Pyaasa (1957) and Elvis Presley’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Lal curates the brand’s playlists herself, which are as eclectic as Good Earth’s collections of home products, apparels, beauty products, fragrances, etc.
The still-in-the-making 2021 collection Bosphorus, inspired by the Turkish strait, looks beyond India and to the world, borrowing elements from Roman, Greece, Turkish, Persian and Indian design influences.
Even last year, in the middle of the pandemic when most brands were not particularly launching anything new, Lal pushed her team to create a collection centred on flowers, Pushpanjali. “Flowers, I think, make one happy and elevate one’s mood. So, in the distress of the lockdown I thought that the collection will make people feel better.”
Lal, a psychology graduate, is an instinctive businesswoman. She started her first Mumbai store on an impulse in 1996. Her husband Vikram Lal, founder of Eicher Motors, was going to set up a bike showroom in the Kemps Corner space, but she convinced him to let her have the store. “As a studio potter back in the days, I saw a market gap between the dying art of India’s village potters and the urban consumer looking for high-quality home products. We began our journey with a mission to bring our crafts into the contemporary, to make them relevant and elevate artisanal products to their original level of luxury,” she says.