From gold jewellery to golden tunes

AT THE Singapore Indoor Stadium this Saturday (Mar 4), Indian superstar Anirudh Ravichander will perform to a 12,000-strong crowd – thanks to a show organiser familiar with the Midas touch.

The founder of concert company Maestro Productions, Parthiban Murugaiyan, did not start out in this line of business – not even remotely.

When he was 23 in 1995, he had taken over his father’s gold-jewellery business. Ishtara Jewellery was a small operation then, with one outlet and four employees. But “adapting and evolving” were Parthiban’s key beliefs. In 1997, he upgraded the business through automation, implemented barcode tagging and scanning for inventory control, when such technology was not widespread. But it lifted the business out doing manual sorting and counting.