Girdhar Akbari.

Girdhar Akbari is the founder of Atcraft Innovations, a Jamnagar, Gujarat manufacturer and exporter of precision brass components - in the cluster the metal trade simply calls Asia's brass hub. It is a craft of small, exacting things made well: the threaded insert moulded into a plastic housing, the fastener that holds an assembly together, the turned part that disappears inside a finished product and is never seen again. The business began in 1994 and today runs across three plants, shipping to more than 35 countries.

The Maker

Precision components are an unforgiving category to build a name in. An insert, a fastener or a machined part is measured in microns, threaded to a gauge, and expected to fit a customer's assembly the same way ten thousand times over - so there is no hiding a shortcut. The only thing that lasts in this trade is consistency: making the next piece exactly like the last one. That conviction is the one he keeps returning to.

Brass is a forgiving metal to live with and an unforgiving one to work badly. It machines cleanly, holds a thread, takes a plating well and conducts and seals where a part has to - but only if the alloy, the machining and the finishing are disciplined. Getting that right, piece after piece, to a customer's drawing, is the whole craft.

The Operator

His approach as a businessman is plain. The customer's standard, not the maker's convenience, sets the bar. Finish is not a detail - it is the part of a product the customer sees and touches every day. And a first order is only a chance; the reorder is the business, earned by getting the first one right.

The discipline is simple to say and hard to live: make the same good product, to the same specification, again and again. In a trade where the sample is easy and the ten-thousandth piece is the test, that is the only durable differentiator - and it has to be built into the process, not inspected at the end.

The Mentor - For First-Generation Makers

Girdhar keeps an open door for younger founders and family-business operators in manufacturing and the brass and engineering trades - the wider ecosystem of Indian SMEs that make and ship real products. The conversations are direct and practical: holding quality while scaling, winning a customer's first order and earning the reorder, managing working capital across a long manufacturing cycle, and keeping a family enterprise focused as it grows.

The Craft

Atcraft Innovations makes the small, exacting parts that larger products are built from. The categories it produces:

• Brass Inserts - Threaded and moulding brass inserts - the small parts that give plastic and assembled products a durable metal thread, machined to a precise fit.
• Brass Fasteners - Hex nuts, bolts, screws and allied fasteners in brass - the everyday fixings that have to hold, made to size and standard, batch after batch.
• Plumbing & PPR Fittings - Brass plumbing fittings, PPR fittings, extension nipples and spindles - the connectors a water or gas line is built from, where the thread and the seal cannot fail.
• Electrical Parts - Switch pins, switchgear and transformer parts, battery terminals and electrical components - precision brass for the electrical and electronic industries.
• Brass Anchors - Brass anchors and fixing hardware - the parts that hold a fitting to the wall, machined to grip and to last.
• Precision Components - Forged and machined brass components, auto parts and customised turned parts - made to a customer's drawing and specification, from one part to a full programme.

Vision

Make precision brass so reliably that the world keeps reordering it.

Jamnagar makes brass for the world, and has done for generations. The opportunity is to take that heritage and raise it - to be the maker a serious manufacturer chooses because the parts are always right and always on time. That means leading on the things that actually matter in components: precision, consistency, and a dispatch a customer can plan around.

That ambition started in a small Jamnagar workshop in 1994 and now reaches manufacturers in more than thirty-five countries across the electrical, automobile, plumbing and hardware industries. The goal is to grow it further - widening the range, deepening the precision, and holding the quality and dispatch bar on every part, in every plant, in every market.

Operating Principles

The way he works is anchored in six principles - the standards that do not get compromised, whatever the order or the deadline:

1. Quality, every order - A brass component goes inside someone else's product. There is no room for a weak part - so quality is built into the process, checked at every stage, and never traded for speed.
2. In-time dispatch - A part that is right but late still stops a customer's line. Dispatching on time, order after order, is half the promise - and the half a customer plans their own production around.
3. Vertical integration - From raw material to finished, packed part under one roof, across owned plants and machinery. Controlling the whole process is how a maker controls cost, quality and delivery instead of inheriting someone else's.
4. Consistency is the product - The sample is easy; the ten-thousandth part is the test. A customer building us into their product is trusting that the next batch is exactly like the last - and protecting that trust is the whole job.
5. Made to specification - Much of the work is to a customer's own drawing, thread and finish. Making exactly what was specified, from one part to a full programme, is how a components maker earns a long relationship.
6. Integrity and transparency - Excellence, hard work, integrity, passion and transparency - the values the firm was built on. A components business runs on trust across borders, and trust is earned the slow, honest way.

Get in touch

For business, brass-component sourcing and mentorship conversations - and for media - send a note using the contact form and it reaches him directly.