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 a…