Homegrown brand Inbase has carved a niche for itself in the smart accessories segment, thanks to its wide range of products, from smart wearables to audio devices, and handset enhancers to other lifestyle gadgets. The brand particularly excels in the smartwatch category. In what may be called an achievement of sort, Inbase grew 200% from the previous financial year in spite of COVID-19 pandemic. Aashish Kumbhat, Founder and Director, Inbase, shares with Ramesh Kumar Raja, the company’s plan to be a prominent market leader in the ever-growing industry. Excerpts:

How’s the brand Inbase positioned itself in a hyper-competitive market like India having a number of big and small players in the smart accessories segment?

We as a brand are positioned in people’s mind by offering quality products at affordable prices to our target audience. Inbase has also grabbed the attention of a large segment of audience with our unique promotional strategies and product placements across India in all major LFRs (Large Format Retails). Despite COVID-19 pandemic, as a brand, we have grown 200% from the previous financial year. So, without a doubt, we are heading towards right direction.

You offer a wide range of products, from smart wearables to audio devices, and handset accessories to other lifestyle products. Which among them is a dominant vertical for Inbase?

Audio segment like earphones, Bluetooth neckbands and speakers were always the best-selling products for us. But, in the last two years, we have seen a phenomenal growth in our smart wearable vertical and we already have a strong portfolio of smartwatches and also coming up with more advanced features integrated smartwatches in the near future.

How are your products gaining traction in the market?

As said earlier, we have seen tremendous amount of growth in the terms of sales; which indirectly indicates that the products were grabbing enormous traction in the market. In the last 12 months, we have won multiple prestigious awards for our brand from some of the topmost media houses. These are the milestones which indicate that we are heading towards the right direction.

Which are the areas from where maximum demand is coming for the Inbase products in India?

In India, we are very strong in the southern states but we are also getting huge response from the rest of India with our participation in expo and trade fairs. We have even seen demand for our products outside India, we are already exporting our products to 20+ countries. We are also open to collaborate for our distributorship model.

Online or offline – which platform yields maximum revenue for you?

At present, we have a very strong foothold in offline market. Having said that, we are constantly building our online presence as well, in big way. We all can realize that the digital is the future, so we are preparing at a fast pace.

What is your approach to the “after sales service” which remains an issue for the majority of electronics companies?

We have a very strong and dedicated in-house after sales service team, where all the enquiries post sales are addressed. We consciously built this team with people from diverse background, multilingual specialists, tech geeks etc. to offer top notch service to our clienteles.

There is a parallel grey market in India thriving on counterfeit accessories and devices. How do you deal with them?

The grey market is not only in our industry, almost all industries are facing the same issues but definitely, it’s more common in our industry. But we have seen a huge shift customer preference, they want original branded products with warranty which counterfeit market will not be able to do.

What are your outreach and investment plans for India?

Being an Indian brand, we already took initiatives to give back to the community by setting up our manufacturing units in certain states of India. It also strengthens the government’s Make in India initiative to grow forward. We are also deploying a strong in-house designing team for both software and hardware elements, to eliminate the dependency from other countries.

Please tell us something about R&D and innovation at Inbase?

The ultimate reason for our brand’s growth always lies in R&D and innovation, that’s the key mantra at Inbase. We had set up a solid R&D team who test the products about 2 to 3 months before launching them in the market. That’s why we are able to sustain with such a diverse portfolio of products in mobile accessories. Innovation with quality makes us one of the pioneers in this field.

The emergence of IoT has opened a new avenue of growth for many tech companies. Is Inbase leveraging this trend?

We are strongly doing our research to incorporate IoT things in our smartwatches, developing in-built advanced features of integration with Apple Siri, Google Voice, Alexa etc. Our recently-launched product, Urban LYF, is a first of a kind smartwatch under the price range of Rs 5,000 which comes with Bluetooth calling feature.