Saved Wikipedia page (Feb 25, 2026) for "Mohan Murjani"

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1983 (June 21) - NY Times : "MURJANI SEEKING A STABLE OF DESIGNERS"

By Pamela G. Hollie   /   June 21, 1983

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/21/business/murjani-seeking-a-stable-of-designers.html?searchResultPosition=11

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1986 (April 09) - NY Times : "INDIA IS REVISITED AT BLOOMINGDALE'S"

By Anne-Marie Schiro   /   April 9, 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/09/garden/india-is-revisited-at-bloomingdale-s.html?searchResultPosition=6

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1986 (July 15) - NY Times : "NEW YORK DAY BY DAY; Statue of Gandhi Nearing Reality for Union Square"

By Susan Heller Anderson and David W. Dunlap   /   July 15, 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/15/nyregion/new-york-day-by-day-statue-of-gandhi-nearing-reality-for-union-square.html?searchResultPosition=4

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1986 (Oct 03)  - NY Times : "NEW YORK DAY BY DAY; Mahatma's Likeness In Union Square"

By Marvine Howe and David Bird   /   Oct. 3, 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/03/nyregion/new-york-day-by-day-mahatma-s-likeness-in-union-square.html?searchResultPosition=2

1986-10-03-nytimes-new-york-day-by-day-mahatma-s-likeness-in-union-square.pdf

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1986/10/03/issue.html

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

With a garland of marigolds, warm applause, many eloquent words and chants of ''Gandhiji! Gandhiji!,'' the larger-than-life statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi was welcomed yesterday to New York City.

''It is so beautiful,'' ''It is so like him,'' ''It is our Gandhiji'' said members of the Indian community, who had come out for the unveiling ceremony, marking the 117th anniversary of the Indian leader's birth.

On the southwest corner of Union Square, the eight-foot bronze statue shows Gandhi as so many people remember him, with walking stick and wearing only a dhoti, symbolizing Hindu asceticism.

''I can think of no better place to honor Mahatma Gandhi than Union Square park, which has been a forum for public assembly and peaceful protest since the early part of the 20th century,'' said Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern, host for the ceremony.

A leader of the Indian community, Dr. H.K. Chandra Sekhar, said the monument was a gift from India and the Indian community to New York, ''the greatest city in the world.'' He thanked all those who had made it possible, from the Parks Department and Community Board 5 to the artist, H.K. Patel of Ahmedabad, India, and the chief promoter of the project, Yogesh K. Gandhi, a great-grandnephew of the Indian leader.

Special mention was made of the main benefactor, Mohan B. Murjani, president of Murjani Fabrics, who underwrote most of the cost of the $60,000 statue and donated $100,000 to the Parks Department for the maintenance of all the statuary in Union Square.

1986 (Nov 09) - NY Times : "PUSHING FASHION IN THE FAST LANE"

By Lisa Belkin   /   Nov. 9, 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/09/business/pushing-fashion-in-the-fast-lane.html?searchResultPosition=1

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FASHION just doesn't move fast enough for Mohan Murjani.

''Why should it take years for a designer to become a sensation?'' he asks. ''Why should a line grow slowly, when it can be big from the start?''

Mr. Murjani simply refuses to play that waiting game. It was Murjani International, his company, that made Gloria Vanderbilt jeans an overnight sensation that has become a $400 million-a-year retail business. It is Murjani that has catapulted Tommy Hilfiger, the young designer, from obscurity to virtual notoriety.

And now there is Coca-Cola clothing. ''Most of the people in the industry thought it was an absolutely lunatic idea, selling clothes with a soda logo,'' said George Lois, president of Lois Pitts Gershon Pons, Murjani's advertising firm. ''But Mohan understood the idea in a second. He knew it was just a matter of promoting it right.'' Already, Murjani says its expects sales of $250 million in Coca-Cola clothes by the end of this year.

Murjani, which is family-owned, declines to release its sales or earnings. But manufacturers' revenues are generally about half of retail sales, and for some products Murjani's figures are lower still, because it merely receives royalties from licensees for much of the Vanderbilt line.

But Mr. Murjani contends that the lines have fared well, primarily because he has not run the company like an apparel business. The company far outstrips the industry average in the emphasis and money it devotes to market research and advertising. ''Research is very important to us,'' he said last week, in his office in the garment center. (Most of his time is spent in the company's office in London, where he lives with his wife and three teen-age children.) ''In the packaged goods industry,'' he said, ''they have learned the value of market research but in apparel it is rarely done.''

Similarly, he notes that few manufacturers advertise, preferring to leave that to retailers. Mr. Murjani, in contrast, advertises with gusto, often using themes that unabashedly piggyback on competitors' fame and successes. ''We're kind of made for each other, Murjani and me,'' Mr. Lois said. ''He likes to go for the jugular and so do I.''

Not surprisingly, Murjani has its share of critics. Kurt Barnard, publisher of the Retail Marketing Report, an industry newsletter, calls its products ''fads'' and ''public relations phenomena,'' and warns that ''as with all fads, they are doomed the moment they succeed.'' Still, he conceded, ''until they do, there is a lot of money to be made.''

Rival manufacturers, meanwhile, claim that the originality of Murjani's advertising belies the copycat nature of his product line. ''We were very, very honored that Coca-Cola would take our rugby shirt, our best-selling item, and put Coca-Cola on the front where ours says Benetton,'' Sally Fischer, a Benetton spokesman, said with more than a trace of sarcasm. IF not for a last-minute change of mind, the world might never have been introduced to Coca-Cola shirts and Vanderbilt jeans. Born in 1946, in a part of India that is now Pakistan, Mr. Murjani was raised in Hong Kong, where his father ran a successful apparel factory. He was educated in England and said he was accepted by Stanford University where, he said, he planned a pre-med biology major.

''I had no intention of ever going into the business,'' he said. ''I was going to take the share of the business that I felt was my due and I was going to go off to Africa and help people.''

Days before school began, however, he decided ''out of nowhere'' to major in business and called the dean of Babson College, a business school near Boston. ''I don't know why I didn't just go to Stanford and study business,'' he said. ''But I got it in my head that I should go to Babson and, when I get something in my head, it sticks.''

One of his classmates at Babson was Roger Enrico, now president of Pepsi-Cola USA, which last month introduced a line of Pepsi clothes to compete with Murjani's Coca-Cola line. The two remain friends, and Mr. Murjani was Mr. Enrico's guest at the debut fashion show of Pepsi clothes at the Hayden Planetarium.

When Mr. Murjani graduated in 1967 his father held a party in Hong Kong and announced - to the younger Mr. Murjani's surprise - that he was, as of that moment, handing the reins of the company to his son.

The elder Mr. Murjani, now 72 years old, is still a close adviser to his oldest son. His second son, Ramesh, 36, runs the London office and his youngest son, Dalip, runs the factory in Hong Kong. His only daughter, Bina Dialdas, lives in Hong Kong with her husband and children.

Initially, Murjani produced only private label clothing for stores such as K Mart and lines like Levi and Wrangler. The company still produces private label clothes for Federated Department Stores and The Limited, but now ''it is a small part of the business,'' Mr. Murjani said.

As the new chairman and president, Mr. Murjani set out to upgrade the quality of the private label merchandise and to expand the types of products the company made. Soon Murjani was making everything from bicycles to spinning machines for textile mills - an overexpansion that took its toll in slashed profits.

In the mid-1970's, Mr. Murjani spent several months in the United States, seeking a garment that would turn Murjani's fortunes around. Jeans, he decided, were ''the single most important garment in the Western Hemisphere. But all the jeans makers had been producing jeans for women that were cut the same as jeans for men.'' Even before Calvin Klein and others introduced their now-famous jeans, he directed his designers to develop a denim jean cut for a woman's figure.

Gloria Vanderbilt did not design the resulting form-fitting jeans, but her name went on their pocket. When the line was offered in 1978, stores pre-ordered only 6,000 pairs. An optimistic Mr. Murjani nonetheless produced 100,000 pairs and introduced a $1 million advertising campaign on a Tuesday night. On Wednesday, Bloomingdale's New York store sold out.

The experience made Mr. Murjani a firm believer in the power of Madison Avenue. He returned to that shrine in 1984, with Tommy Hilfiger, a 35-year-old freelance designer with no track record but ''a certain something'' that Mr. Murjani liked. In the past 18 months, Murjani has spent $20 million to promote the designer, $3 million for advertising and the rest to establish Hilfiger stores.

Indeed, much of the money went into a provocative advertising campaign earlier this year. Throughout New York, billboards, buses and telephone booths blossomed with a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle: ''The 4 great American designers for men are: R---- L-----, P---- E----, C----- K---- and T---- H-------.'' Some members of the fashion world were infuriated by the presumption of an unknown identifying himself with Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. Even Mr. Hilfiger called himself ''a marketing vehicle.''

The first Hilfiger store opened in August 1985, on Columbus Avenue near 73d Street. Mr. Murjani says that in the first 12 months it did $1 million in sales, or more than $2,000 a square foot, a number Mr. Barnard calls ''extremely high.'' He and other analysts say the industry average for specialty stores is about $500 a square foot.

There are now 5 Hilfiger stores and 85 department stores that carry the label. Joel J. Horowitz, president of Murjani, said the company expects to have more than 1,000 Tommy Hilfiger stores worldwide within five years. ''Tommy was going to be successful,'' he said. ''It might have taken ten years. This way it took two.'' IT didn't even take two years to make a success of Coca-Cola clothes. When Coke representatives approached Murjani in October 1983, they were interested in only a modest line of apparel. But ''the idea grew as we talked about it,'' said Richard Hosp, vice president of marketing for Murjani. ''Mohan said to me, 'This is a very big idea. It is a very big good idea or a very big bad idea. Go find out which.' ''

To explore consumer interest, the company intercepted people in shopping malls and asked their opinion of mock-ups of possible Coca-Cola clothes. Reaction was positive and, with 280 million people around the world drinking Coca-Cola every day, name recognition was no problem.

The next task was to find the proper image for the stores. Someone suggested a nostalgic ice-cream parlor motif, ''you know, the formica counter, soda-jerks in white caps, the works,'' Mr. Hosp said. ''We were all excited about it.'' But when the idea was tested in consumer focus groups, it fell as flat as a warm glass of Coke. Consumers placed Coca-Cola in the context of the future, not the past. Murjani promptly shelved the ice-cream parlor idea (a facade remains in the Murjani offices, ''a reminder of a mistake we almost made,'' said Mr. Hosp) and opened 1,400 chrome and white-tile boutiques in department stores nationwide.

The first free-standing store was opened a year ago this weekend, next door to Tommy Hilfiger on Columbus Avenue. There are now five such stores nationwide - one opened in San Francisco yesterday, another is scheduled to open in Stamford, Conn., within weeks - and Mr. Murjani said he intends to open 650 such stores by 1992.

But the New York store is the flagship, where new ideas will be tested. It is a cross between a cafeteria and a video arcade. Passers-by can see the clothes through a wall of windows on a 25-foot video screen 24 hours a day, and at an electronic video machine outside (see box).

Inside, floor-to-ceiling bins fill three sides of the store, holding 125 styles of Coca-Cola clothes. There are video touch terminals on the upper entrance level. By touching the proper square on the screen customers can see an item in any color, get a close-up of a collar or pocket and a rundown of prices, sizes, fabric and other vital statistics.

The next stop is the cafeteria-like selling floor, where a stainless-steel unit dispenses trays with the Coca-Cola logo. Shoppers slide the tray around the counter, place an order, collect it on the tray and walk through the line.

The store has attracted nationwide attention, as has the Hilfiger campaign. In fact, Mr. Murjani says that young designers approach the company, asking to be its next project. ''From one little crazy spark a business might be created,'' Mr. Murjani said. ''We're always thinking about the future. Always thinking about the future.'' USHERING IN RETAIL'S ELECTRONIC AGE

Mohan Murjani has strong feelings about how Coca-Cola stores should look: ''Not something that would feel like the future, but would be the future.''

To him, and many other manufacturers and retailers, that means a store that uses video machines to demonstrate products and take orders for them. Murjani's version is Eric, the acronym for the machine and for the Electronic Retail Investment Corporation, the Murjani subsidiary that makes it.

Eric, just outside the New York Coca-Cola store, looks like an automated teller machine. Passers-by can touch the screen to see close-ups of the clothes, insert their credit cards and place their orders.

Eric is hardly perfect. On a recent Saturday morning, customers complained that the pictures of the items were too small, that they come and go too fast, that the images are hard to see in the sunlight, that the quoted prices are sometimes wrong and that not everything sold in the store is available from the machine. Though more than a dozen people stopped at the machine over a two-hour period, no one made a purchase.

But Mr. Murjani is unfazed. The price of the Coca-Cola clothes ranges from $30 to $50, and Mr. Murjani says Eric, which costs between $8,000 and $10,000, can break even on two sales a day. However, Thomas R. Rauh, national director of retail consulting for Touche Ross & Co., projects the breakeven point at about $500 a day.

Mr. Murjani plans to have 1,500 Erics operating by the end of 1997. Most will be far from department stores - for example, in old-age homes, where residents are expected to buy Coca-Cola clothes for their grandchildren.

Mr. Rauh says that more than 200 companies are using or selling similar machines. He estimates that there will be 30,000 video sales machines in the United States by the end of this year, twice as many as in 1985. Moreover, he predicts that by 1990 there will be 70,000 picture-only machines and 30,000 order-taking machines, generating as much as $3 billion in sales.

Already, Clairol is having good success with a videotape machine, made by Intermark Corporation, that lets customers see how a certain rouge or lipstick would look when applied. And Amtech Inc., a New York company, is running Express Shop USA kiosks at a half-dozen airports. Machines in the kiosks give 20-second glimpses of 92 products; customers can place orders with a credit card for everything from Gund teddy bears to $1,500 Cartier watches.

There are some bugs in the system - few people were willing to buy a $1,500 watch from a machine, for instance. But Keith Greenberg, Amtech president, says each machine is processing 10 to 12 sales a day.

Within months Amtech, operating jointly with Liberty Travel, hopes to have a network of travel kiosks that will show videos of vacation sites, make reservations, and print tickets and itineraries. ''There've been many revolutions in this country - the American revolution, the industrial revolution,'' Mr. Greenberg said. ''We stand for the credit card revolution.''

This revolution already has losers, though. The CompuSave Corporation of Irvine, Calif., tried to sell pots, pans, even televisions from terminals in supermarkets in four states, primarily in rural areas with few discount stores. The machines, which offered 3,000 items at discount, never caught on, Mr. Rauh said, and the company filed for bankruptcy.

Mr. Murjani remains undeterred by such bleak stories. He was recently impressed with an experimental machine in the Paris subway that drops Levi jeans from a chute in the wall, and plans to test such a machine in his stores. ''Soon everyone will be shopping by machines,'' he said. ''When that happens, we want to be ready.''

2001 (June 10) - NY Times : "A NIGHT IN WITH -- Malini and Mohan Murjani; Exercise in Family Chic"

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/style/a-night-in-with-malini-and-mohan-murjani-exercise-in-family-chic.html

By Susan M. Kirschbaum   /   June 10, 2001

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Based on reports surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and court documents, Ghislaine Maxwell accompanied Prince Andrew on a trip to Phuket, Thailand. 

The Trip: The trip is described as a "wild holiday" where the group allegedly visited red-light district clubs, including areas in the Patong resort town, and frequented bars staffed by semi-naked go-go dancers.

The Context: The holiday took place around 2001, just months before Prince Andrew allegedly sexually abused Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

Significance: This excursion is often highlighted to illustrate the close, long-term relationship between Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell, despite the Duke's denials of improper behavior.

Further Travel: Reports indicate that in addition to Thailand, Maxwell facilitated travel for the Prince to other locations. 

Note - The Vanderbilt Estate of Murjani is only a couple miles from the Amani... 

https://www.nationthailand.com/life/30297522