Taking the silk route into electronics

PARIS. Silk. Put those two words together and you have... an electronics store? Yes, says Michael Primalani. With a smile that belies a bemused man who's heard that joke countless times, he proceeded to explain how he headed a rebranding exercise to take the six-decade old Parisilk brand into the 21st century.

"I wanted to do something that was a little bit more relevant. I wanted to create a brand. And Paris Silk Store (what the shop was originally called) was a name, not really a brand," Parisilk's head of corporate sales and business development said.

"Even until the late 1980s and early '90s, we still had people calling and asking us for textiles, because of the word 'silk' in the name. They would flip through the yellow pages back then and jump on that word."