82 Business View - December 2014
Committed to its Customers
Family work ethic has resulted in four decades of business for Venus Group
Raj Patel has come a long way… in every sense of the
phrase.
The native of India arrived in the United States in the
late 1960s with his brother, Kirit, and the pair quickly
began to seek out ways in which they could find a prac-
tical use for a combined scholastic background in sci-
ence and engineering.
Federal legislation at the time allowed non-U.S. na-
tives to secure green cards by making a $10,000 in-
vestment within specified geographic areas, but an ini-
tial venture on a full-service car wash came up empty
– prompting the brothers to shift their attention to, of
all things, towels.
Now, more than 40 years later, that timely change of
focus is still paying dividends.
“We never knew anything about towels,” Patel said. “So
we called some import/exporters in India and brought
in some towels, and that’s how we started the busi-
ness. We started to find more diversified customers to
sell the towels to, and then kept adding items to that.”
Manufacturing table linens was initially considered
MANUFACTURING
