Our Story
How Arun Shah built India’s longest-running calendar export operation — and what 64 years of continuous calendar work actually means for procurement buyers.
In a Bombay office in 1962, a 23-year-old commerce graduate from the University of Bombay began calling on businesses with a sample case of calendars he hadn’t printed. Arun Shah had no press, no factory, no manufacturing experience. What he had was a relationship with the calendar printers of Sivakasi — the southern Tamil Nadu cluster that even then dominated India’s calendar manufacturing — and the conviction that Bombay’s commercial market wanted what Sivakasi could produce.
Sixty-four years later, the company that grew out of those office visits — Arun Art Printers Pvt. Ltd. — produces more than two million calendars a year, exports to four continents, runs two Mumbai facilities, and counts a Bombay Master Printers’ Association presidency among its founder’s credentials. Arun Shah, now 87, is still active in the business. The trade calls him the Calendar Man of Mumbai.
This is the story of how that name attached — and what 64 years of continuous calendar work actually means when a procurement buyer asks the question that matters: can I trust this supplier to deliver fifty thousand calendars to my warehouse in November?
1962
To understand why a man calling himself a calendar marketer mattered in 1962, you have to understand what Bombay’s print trade looked like at the time.
Calendars were not a peripheral category. They were the commercial wall artefact of every Indian office — the surface that recorded festivals, audit deadlines, harvest cycles, monsoon onsets, and tax dates. Companies ordered them in volumes that surprise modern buyers. A medium-sized Bombay trading firm might place a thousand-piece calendar order for staff and customer distribution; a bank could order twenty thousand. The market was real, sustained, and seasonal.
Manufacturing happened mostly in Sivakasi. The southern town’s lithographic printers — established originally in the matchbox and fireworks economy — had built calendar-printing into a parallel cluster by the 1950s. By 1962, Sivakasi printed more than half of India’s commercial calendars. But Sivakasi presses were far from Bombay buyers. Order sourcing, sample presentation, artwork supervision, delivery follow-up — these required someone physically present in Bombay’s commercial districts.
That someone, in 1962, was Arun Shah.
A B.Com from the University of Bombay (the institution officially renamed University of Mumbai in 1996; the historical name is the certificate-accurate one for credentials earned before that date), Arun spent his earliest years in business in offices, not on press floors. He carried sample books of Sivakasi calendars. He took artwork briefs from advertising managers and trading-house proprietors. He negotiated specifications, delivery schedules, and prices. He shipped artwork south, supervised proofs by mail, and brought back the finished calendars in time for the year-end gift season.
This is the period that procurement buyers usually overlook when they read “founded 1962” on a printer’s website. Arun Art was not yet printing its own calendars in 1962. What Arun Art was doing was something arguably harder: building the buyer relationships, the artwork-handling discipline, the spec-control rigour, and the delivery accountability that would later become the foundation of in-house printing. By the time Arun Shah set up his own press in 1975, he had already spent thirteen years learning the calendar market from the demand side.
That learning still shows in how Arun Art sells today. The company talks to procurement professionals, not creative-services clients. The vocabulary is GSM, registration accuracy, lead time, MOQ, AD code, ocean transit, customs clearance. That orientation was built in the 1962–1975 period, not retrofitted later.
1975
By 1975, Arun Shah had been distributing Sivakasi calendars to Bombay buyers for thirteen years. He had identified the operational bottleneck that no amount of distribution discipline could fix: the round trip to Sivakasi added weeks to every job, and any change to artwork or specification after press start was logistically impossible from Bombay.
The solution was vertical integration. In 1975 — at age 36, with the capital accumulated from thirteen years of calendar marketing — he set up his own press in Sion, a commercial district in central-east Bombay. The Sion facility remains Arun Art’s primary manufacturing location today, 51 years later.
Vertical integration in the Indian print trade in 1975 was not the obvious choice it appears in retrospect. Most calendar marketers stayed in distribution; capital, equipment availability, skilled labour, and operational risk all argued against owning a press. The decision to install one was a bet — that Bombay’s calendar market was big enough to absorb in-house capacity year-round, that the customer relationships Arun had built since 1962 would survive a change in supplier model, and that the operational discipline of pre-press, press, and binding could be built in Bombay without the Sivakasi cluster’s accumulated knowledge.
It was a correct bet. From 1975 forward, Arun Art’s calendar production happened on its own equipment, under its own quality control, with its own delivery schedules. Customers who had previously placed orders six months before the calendar year could place them four months before. Artwork changes — including those that came from the customer side weeks into a press run — could be accommodated. Specifications could be tested on small runs before committing to a season’s full volume.
This was the period that established Arun Art as a Bombay calendar printer rather than a Sivakasi calendar distributor. By the mid-1980s, the company’s customer base included some of Bombay’s established commercial houses; by the late 1980s, the production volume warranted serious capital investment in better equipment.
1992 – 1993
Biren Shah completed his B.Com from the University of Bombay in 1992 and joined the business the same year. Keyur Shah completed his B.Com from the University of Bombay and a Diploma in Offset Printing Technology from the London School of Printing (1992–93), and joined the business in 1993.
The two sons brought what their father’s solo trajectory had necessarily lacked: divided expertise. Keyur took on production and technical responsibility — pre-press, offset press operations, conversion, binding, finishing. The London School of Printing diploma is, even today, a rare credential in the Indian print trade; it provided a technical vocabulary and a benchmarking reference for the company’s production discipline. Biren took on finance, administration, and — within a decade — the export business.
The decade between 1992 and 2002 was largely about building the foundation for what would later become Arun Art’s international export business. The Indian liberalisation reforms of 1991 had begun to open the Indian export economy in ways that earlier decades had not. Trade exhibitions, international buyer visits, and the first inquiries from foreign procurement teams started reaching Mumbai printers in the mid-1990s. Arun Art positioned itself for that inflection point across the ten years Biren spent learning international procurement conventions, ocean-freight logistics, customs documentation, foreign-exchange management, and the substrate, ink, binding, and packaging standards that international buyers required.
This is the section of the company’s history that buyers most often skip — the unglamorous decade of qualification work that precedes export readiness. Arun Art did not become an exporter in 1992 when Biren joined the business. It became an exporter in 2002, after ten years of internal preparation. That preparation is what separates 24 years of export track record from 24 years of accidental international orders.
2002
The first calendar export shipment left Mumbai in 2002. The destination markets in those early years were what they remain today: the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and parts of Africa.
The transition from a domestic calendar printer to a calendar exporter required changes at every operational layer. Pre-press standards moved from Indian commercial-print conventions to international ICC colour profiles. Substrates that worked for Indian domestic distribution had to be replaced with substrates that survived an ocean voyage and twelve months of overseas office display. Binding had to be tested for transit durability — the bent-hanger problem in particular separates suppliers who have shipped calendars internationally from suppliers who haven’t. Packaging had to be redesigned for palletisation and ocean-container loading rather than truck-loading for Bombay-suburb distribution. Documentation had to satisfy export-finance banks, customs at both ends, and overseas buyer auditing.
The company built these capabilities incrementally, on real orders, rather than on speculative investment. The result, 24 years later, is a calendar export operation that handles substrates from 60 gsm paper to 420 gsm board on a Heidelberg Speedmaster SM102 6-colour press and a Komori Lithrone 102 4-colour press with an in-line Coater; produces over two million calendars a year; serves four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America); operates from two Mumbai facilities (Sion in central Mumbai and Kopar Khairane in Navi Mumbai); and maintains a uniform 500-piece minimum order quantity across all four product lines — a MOQ low enough that international buyers can place real qualification runs rather than evaluate suppliers on paper samples alone.
2004 & 2023
Arun Art added children’s-book printing as a product line in 2004 — twenty-two years ago. The book line was built using the same offset-press infrastructure as the calendar line, with additional capability for case-bound and saddle-stitched book formats. Volume now runs to over fifteen million books a year, with single-run capacity up to five hundred thousand copies. Book exports began the same year. The line serves Indian and international children’s-book publishers across the same four continents that take Arun Art’s calendars.
The mono-carton packaging line was added in 2023 — three years ago. It currently serves bulk-FMCG carton work, runs on a Maxima die-cutter and an Acme folder-gluer, and handles Duplex, FBB, and SBS substrates in the 210–400 gsm range at a capacity of approximately 200,000 cartons per day. The carton line is a newer capability and the company makes no historical-authority claim around it. Carton exports are zero to date. FSC chain-of-custody certification is not currently held on the carton line; substrates are sourced from mills that hold their own certifications, but Arun Art does not currently carry CoC.
This is the kind of operational honesty that distinguishes a 64-year-old business from a one-decade business pretending to be older. The calendar history is real; the book history is real; the carton history is short, and the company says so directly.
2000 – 2001
The Bombay Master Printers’ Association — BMPA for short — is the trade body for printers in the Mumbai region, with a membership that includes most of the city’s commercial printing operations. Membership signals operating presence; presidency signals peer recognition.
Arun Shah served a one-year term as President of the Bombay Master Printers’ Association in 2000–2001.
The timing matters. The BMPA presidency tenure coincided with a pivotal moment in Arun Art’s corporate trajectory: in the same year, the business was formally incorporated as a private limited company — Arun Art Printers Pvt. Ltd. (Companies Act CIN U74300MH2000PTC129502) — moving from a long-standing proprietorship structure to a corporate one. The first calendar export shipment left Mumbai two years later, in 2002. The 2000–2002 window thus carries three structural milestones in close sequence: corporate incorporation, trade-association peer recognition at the presidency level, and the start of the export business that has defined the company since.
Trade-association leadership is the procurement-buyer credential that’s hardest to fake, because it depends on the votes or appointment of competitive peers — printers who are not professionally inclined to elevate each other for no reason. A presidency tenure at BMPA means that, at a specific point in the company’s history, Arun Shah was regarded by other Mumbai printers as the right person to represent the city’s print trade. That credential survives a foreign buyer’s cross-check against BMPA’s own records — verification that no marketing claim can match.
The “Calendar Man of Mumbai” moniker has attached over decades of continuous calendar work, BMPA peer recognition, and the accumulated trade-cluster memory of a single founder who stayed in the same product category when most of his contemporaries diversified out. The name is used by Mumbai print-trade colleagues, long-term suppliers, and long-term customers. It is not a self-applied marketing label.
Family business
Arun Art is a two-generation family business. Arun Shah, the founder, remains active at 87. Keyur Shah serves as Director of Production and Technical with 33 years of tenure as of 2026. Biren Shah serves as Director of Finance and International Business with 34 years of tenure as of 2026.
The company does not claim three generations. There is no third generation currently in the business. Honesty matters here for two reasons. First, claims about generational succession are easy to inflate and hard to verify — international buyers learn quickly which Indian businesses inflate their succession narratives. Second, a business that says “two generations” carries a different succession-risk profile than a business that says “three” — and a procurement buyer’s risk model treats those differently. Stating it directly lets the buyer make their own judgement.
The 33-and-34-year tenures of the second-generation directors are themselves a procurement-grade credential. Many family businesses in the Indian print trade transition between generations every fifteen to twenty years. Both Keyur and Biren have now spent more working time at Arun Art than most first-generation owner-operators have spent at the companies they founded. That continuity stabilises the operational knowledge in ways that recently-transitioned businesses cannot match.
Industry evolution
Procurement buyers who order calendars in 2026 inherit a manufacturing infrastructure built across six decades of continuous technical evolution. Hand-composition gave way to photo-typesetting in the 1970s, photo-typesetting gave way to desktop publishing in the late 1980s, desktop publishing gave way to computer-to-plate (CTP) pre-press in the 2000s. Letterpress yielded to offset litho; small offset yielded to large-format multi-colour presses; manual binding yielded to high-speed Wire-O and saddle-stitch lines.
Arun Art participated in each transition. The press hall at Sion today runs a Heidelberg Speedmaster SM102 6-colour and a Komori Lithrone 102 4-colour with an in-line Coater. CTP pre-press replaced film output more than a decade ago. The bindery handles Wire-O, plastic-spiral, saddle-stitch, perfect-bound, and case-bound formats. None of this is unusual in 2026 — but the company that runs it has been printing calendars continuously since 1975 and marketing them since 1962, which is.
The Indian calendar-export market itself has changed beyond recognition. Indian calendar printers were essentially absent from international procurement in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2000s, Mumbai and Sivakasi clusters had begun competing for US and European corporate-calendar programmes. By the mid-2010s, India had become a recognised sourcing region for bulk calendar work, with the procurement advantage that Indian print exporters did not require the very high minimum order quantities that some competing regions imposed. By 2026, Indian calendar exports are an established procurement category, and Arun Art holds one of the longest continuous track records in that category — 24 years of calendar exports, anchored in 64 years of calendar manufacturing.
Today
Two Mumbai facilities
Sion plant (central Mumbai’s commercial district; continuously operational since 1975). Kopar Khairane plant (Navi Mumbai; additional press and finishing capacity).
Pre-press
Computer-to-plate (CTP) plate-making. ICC-profile-managed proofing.
Offset press
Heidelberg Speedmaster SM102 6-colour and Komori Lithrone 102 4-colour with in-line Coater. Substrate range: 60 gsm paper to 420 gsm board.
Bindery & finishing
Wire-O, plastic-spiral, saddle-stitch, perfect-bound, case-bound. Soft-touch lamination, UV drip-off and spot UV on the commercial-print finishing line.
Annual output
Over two million calendars per year. Over fifteen million children’s books per year. Single-run book capacity up to five hundred thousand copies.
Markets served
Four continents — Asia (India home market plus other Asian exports), Africa, Europe, North America. Uniform 500-piece MOQ across all four product lines.
Verify before you trust
This page closes by inviting verification, not by asking for trust.
A procurement buyer evaluating Arun Art as a supplier should not take any claim on this page on the strength of its prose. The 64-year operating history is verifiable through public records. The BMPA membership and past-presidency are verifiable through BMPA’s own office. The two Mumbai facility addresses are publicly listed and physically visitable; factory visits are hosted on both Sion and Kopar Khairane sites with no photography restrictions.
Public-records handles:
A note on the 1962 founding date and the 2000 incorporation date.
The Arun Art business has operated continuously since 1962, when founder Arun Shah began marketing calendars in Bombay. The business was incorporated as a private limited company — Arun Art Printers Pvt. Ltd. — in the year 2000, 38 years into operations. The earlier decades were run as a proprietorship under Arun Shah and (after 1992–93) with operational involvement of Keyur Shah and Biren Shah. This is the typical Indian family-business pattern: continuous business operations decades before formal Companies Act incorporation. A procurement buyer who looks up the CIN will see “incorporated 2000”; both dates are accurate, and they refer to different things — 1962 is when the business began, 2000 is when the current corporate structure was registered.
The Calendar Man of Mumbai is a moniker that survived sixty-four years because the operation underneath it has been verifiable for sixty-four years. That is the procurement-grade authority that Arun Art trades on. It is also the standard that calendars from India should meet when an international buyer commits a million-dollar programme to a Mumbai supplier.
Start with the public-records cross-check above. When you’re ready, send us your calendar specification and target delivery market — we’ll come back with a structured quotation.