1965
Founded in Ahmedabad.
Tarachand M. Chowatia starts the family's first venture — bearings, fair dealing, and relationships that would outlast every product line that followed.
About Strandply Furniture Essentials
Materials people. Since 1965.
Strandply Furniture Essentials is the furniture-materials house of the Wallgreens Group — three generations of the Chowatia family, six decades in materials, one standard.
Before we chose veneers and laminates, we spent sixty years learning materials the slow way — trading them, importing them, engineering them, and finally manufacturing them. SFE is where all of that arrives in furniture.
01
Who We Are
The newest house. The oldest habit.
Strandply Furniture Essentials is the youngest name in the Wallgreens Group — and the oldest habit in it. The habit is simple: know the material better than anyone selling it to you.
The family began with bearings in 1965, moved through non-ferrous metals, entered wood in 2001, and by 2022 was manufacturing engineered boards at its own plant in Rajkot. In 2025, that accumulated knowledge turned toward furniture — and SFE was founded to carry it.
We are honest about our model. We make some of what we sell, and we choose the rest — from partners we select with the same discipline we apply to our own production. Curation is not a compromise here. It is the craft.
02
The Family
Three generations, one enterprise.
Wallgreens Group traces its roots to 1965, when Tarachand M. Chowatia started a bearing-trading business in Ahmedabad. Across three generations, that single enterprise has grown into a group spanning construction, interiors and industrial infrastructure — trusted by India's leading contractors and developers.
Six decades on, the principle is unchanged: build strong, build to last, and stand behind every partnership. SFE simply brings that principle indoors.
03
The Directors
Four names on the door.
-
01
Jignesh T. Chowatia
Director -
02
Siddhant Chowatia
Director -
03
Suhani Jignesh Chowatia
Director -
04
Katha Mahesh Mehta
Director
Tarachand M. Chowatia started the family's first business in 1965. The journey below is his as much as anyone's.
04
Six decades, told through wood.
05
The Partnership
Chosen the way we choose everything.
SFE's first major act was to select its surface partner. The decorative collections we offer are selected through trusted manufacturing partnerships — established makers of decorative panels and laminates, supplying demanding specifiers internationally.
That partnership makes SFE the authorized pan-India distributor of those surfaces: panels across natural and reconstituted veneer collections, and decorative laminates across solid, woodgrain and material-effect designs.
We publish a partner's credentials as the partner states them, and our own claims as we can prove them. That division of honesty is the whole method of this house.
06
The House of Collections
The surface, the substance, and the story.
- Natural Veneerswood's finest hour, curated leaf by leaf.
- Decorative Laminatessurfaces chosen for design, not catalogue size.
- Vintage Teak · BTCold Burma teak from the heritage archive; wood from a slower century.
- Engineered Boards · HDcMRhigh-density composite boards; the substance beneath the surface.
- Plywoodthe group's own range, including IS:710 marine-grade and IS:303 BWR.
Together they cover what furniture is made of, what it is finished with — and, in the case of our heritage wood, what it is remembered for.
07
What We Stand For
Four habits of this house.
We choose.
Fewer, better — every collection curated, nothing listed to pad a catalogue.
We prove.
We publish only what we can substantiate. Where a claim is a partner's, we say so.
We stay.
Three generations, the same family, answerable in person — many customers have been with the group for decades.
We deliver.
Stocked material, pan-India reach, and the supply discipline of a group that dispatches to construction sites for a living.
08
Looking Forward
The next generation.
Under Jignesh Tarachand Chowatia and now Siddhant Jignesh Chowatia, the group continues to grow — shaping skylines with hybrid formwork, manufacturing engineered boards, and building warehousing designed around its customers.
SFE is the newest chapter of that story, and its ambition is stated plainly: to become the house Indian furniture trusts — one honest collection at a time.
- 60+
- Years of enterprise
- 3
- Generations
- 2400+
- Projects delivered
- 38+
- Cities served
Across the Wallgreens Group
Sixty years ago, this family started with bearings and a principle.
The bearings changed. The principle didn't.
The next generation is hiring — if you want to build something that outlasts you, we should talk.