Founded by Indore’s Jain family, Vijayshri Group has grown from its beginning as a small business of stationery trading to a manufacturer of exercise books, an offset printer, and a packaging provider. The company has grown severalfold and diversified into many other business verticals over the past 30 years. With a range of more than 600 products Vijayshri Notebooks sells more than 50 million notebooks city-wide per year, leveraging its strong network of dealers and distributors.
Indian Printer and Publisher flew to Indore on 29 June, the day of the rooftop collapse in Delhi’s Terminal 1 of Indira Gandhi International Airport due to heavy rainfall. Fortunately, our boarding was designated from Terminal 2. Indore, the cleanest city in India by Swachh Survekshan Awards 2023, is known for the seven-storey Rajwada Palace and the Lal Baag Palace, which dates to the 19th-century Holkar dynasty. The city is believed to have a thriving economy with advancing industrial infrastructure of manufacturing goods and providing services.
In the July issue of Packaging South Asia, we wrote about the packaging vertical of the Vijayshri group. The group ventured into the packaging business only around 2004 with corrugated boxes. Its journey started with a stationery retail business after which it started manufacturing printed commodities. The Jain family grew, and so did their network and knowledge, which helped them enter the commercial printing business.
Vijayshri Group had its humble beginnings with Vijayshri Stationary Mart for the retailing and wholesaling of stationery products and notebooks, around 1985. Gradually, the company started manufacturing these items. “Before 1991, we worked at a small production area within the city with a single-color offset press from Manugraph,” Pritesh Jain, director of the company, said. “We continued with the commercial jobs — posters, folders, brochures, literature, wedding cards, letterpress printing, stationary printing, and many side jobs for ad agencies.”
Pritesh’s elder brother, Nilesh Jain, and his son supervise the notebook business while Pritesh, Rajendra, the eldest brother, and their sons supervise the packaging business.
Being a city-wide provider of notebooks and printed stationery products, the Jain family has seen significant transitions in the Madhya Pradesh industrial infrastructure — from a time when only a few printers existed and the struggle was to survive in the business, to a robust technologically advanced ecosystems where growth and expansions are heard of almost every day. According to Jain, industrial manufacturing in Madhya Pradesh was relatively slow-paced in comparison to the West and North Indian markets.
“Three decades ago, a printer would work on any job they could get their hands on, be it books, brochures, leaflets, even packaging printing. We too faced several challenges such as ordering a machine or getting spare parts, services, and repairs. We had to rely on Delhi and Mumbai for everything. This is not the case anymore. Madhya Pradesh due to its geography has expanded businesses in all four directions, which are more or less at a similar distance.”
On production, Jain says the company has a range of more than 600 products with more than 50 million notebooks sold annually. Due to repeat orders, which are growing constantly, Vijayshri is witnessing a decent year-on-year growth. “We design, manufacture, and market paper stationery products – exercise notebooks, long books, note pads, scrapbooks, drawing books, graph books, corporate stationery products, and printing, writing, and packaging paper. We utilize offset machines from Komori India and inks from Siegwerk and DIC.
Jain said their notebooks are made of the finest paper and other raw materials and on highly advanced machines following all industrial parameters. He says the products are widely appreciated by their clients for features such as strong binding, eye-catching designs, high durability, and light weight. “Our products are tested before the final dispatch to ensure our customers get optimum grade products.”
