The rail is not the problem. Every mill has a swatch rail and every buyer wants to touch the cloth. The problem is everything the rail cannot do: answer GSM without walking to the racks, tell a new salesman what season a sort is for, remember which buyer took which cutting, or exist in two cities at once.
We digitised Rungta International's library in Surat, 800+ fabrics, on their own floor, and the app that came out of it ran their whole stand at Bharat Tex 2026. This is the order that worked, so you can do the first half yourself.
Step one: decide the ten fields
Before a single photograph, agree what one fabric record looks like. Ten fields, no more.
- Sort number
- Composition
- GSM
- Width
- Structure
- Finish
- Season
- Garment it suits
- Available metres
- Photograph
If your existing register has half of these, start with half. The project dies when someone insists every field is filled before anything is loaded. Fill the gaps as the sorts come up in conversation.
Step two: photograph without a studio
A table by a window. A plain grey board. A phone on a small stand at a fixed height. Every sort in the same position, one morning a week, while the light is even. Rungta's range was done exactly like this.
The buyer is comparing sorts on a phone screen, not admiring photographs. Consistency beats quality. Twenty fabrics shot the same way look like a library; twenty shot differently look like a WhatsApp group.
Step three: load it somewhere searchable
A spreadsheet is the honest first version: the ten columns and a link to the photograph. Your salesmen can search it on their phones today.
The limit arrives fast. Five hundred rows. Four people editing. Available metres that are wrong because someone forgot to update the sheet after a sample left. A fair in six weeks. That is the moment it becomes an app problem, and it is exactly the problem Fabrary was built for: the same ten fields, searchable by sort number, composition, structure or garment, filterable by GSM, season or stock, on the phone in his pocket, working with no signal and syncing when the wifi comes back.
Step four: make the library the enquiry log
This is the part most mills miss. The library is not a catalogue. It is where the conversation gets recorded.
She points at a sort on the rail. Your salesman finds it on the phone. He adds it to her enquiry with her quantity, her target price and her note about shade. He photographs her business card and the contact fills itself in. The enquiry gets a number and an owner and the whole team can see it.
Then he cuts her a sample. It is reserved against her enquiry, comes off the available metres for that sort, and is issued in her name. When it comes back, one tap clears it. On day five of the fair, you know which cuttings left with whom. Nothing is on the back of a card.
Step five: keep it alive
A library that is not updated is a catalogue from 2023 with extra steps. Four habits kept Rungta's live:
- New sorts go in the week they are made, photographed the same way, by the same person.
- Available metres are updated when cloth leaves, which the app does automatically when a sample is issued.
- The salesmen use it on ordinary days, not only at fairs, so it is muscle memory by the time it matters.
- One person owns the data. Not the owner. Someone whose job it is.
The order, again
Ten fields. Photograph consistently. Spreadsheet first. Move to an app when the sheet hurts. Record enquiries and samples against the library, not beside it.
If you are at step three and the sheet is starting to hurt, there is a working slice of Fabrary on the Fabrary page with 200 fabrics loaded. Tap one and take an enquiry the way your salesman would. And if Bharat Tex is on the calendar, what a Surat mill should put on a buyer's phone is the companion to this. Or message me with roughly how many sorts you carry and I will tell you how long the load takes.