Gaurav Mehta on brand trust and storytelling

Gaurav, you're in a kind of extraordinary business, right? Noise is all around us. Like we were saying with brands, you know, brands are everywhere. Noise as a phenomenon is everywhere. And your business has basically gatecrashed this incredibly innate need of a customer and created from scratch in India, of India, by for India, an amazing wearables brand, right? Built an incredible wearables brand in this incredibly complex country. It's a story we don't have time to tell in a way, Gaurav. But start us off with this, right? You talk in your marketing about being real, about being authentic. How are you real and authentic through Noise? I think there's a lot of tailwind behind this particular brand becoming what it has become.

There were a lot of macro factors, but I think what we did really well, what the founders did really well for Noise was to understand the impact that fitness and health, we're having for each and every Indian, especially the younger lot, right? 15 to 24, 25 to 34. So this cohort was getting exposed to the impact that health and fitness can have on their lifestyle and their, very frankly, physical augmentation. I think once we understood that part, we knew that we had to be really, really real with people about giving them an ally that helps them get the best out of their health, their fitness, and what they want to do with their physical faculties. Because there's nothing more personal, right? This is your body. It's no one else's body, right?

But then that's where the fun starts, right? So if you can really make a huge fundamental change for consumers with the very organic matter that they're living with, that is like trust of the highest level. And I think that's what we did really well because we understood that this product had to be made, developed, designed in a way where people can actually use it and gain value out of. What I mean by that is there are a lot of players who were doing fairly well on the health spectrum only. But there were some players who were just about using this particular form factor or this lifestyle tech as a fad, as a fashion accessory. We understood that just to be either or is not going to make a lot of difference for the people.

We understood the lifestyle technology. Once these two things, these two points of the spectrum come together, we start to make meaningful contribution to our users' life. By wearing this particular watch, are you getting all your health matrix in real time to make better decisions? And are you looking good also while doing that? Okay, so it's effectively an amalgam of technology with lifestyle. But, you know, you're in an extraordinary landscape. So people like ET here, they've worked for Panasonic, Samsung, you know, established technology giants. We have Apple. We have Sony stomping the market. How have you managed to break into that and in such a complicated country and from nowhere?

I mean, you know, a large part of it comes from one of the founders. I mean, he's a fitness freak, Amit. And he was very invested in fitness and health. So he understood from a user perspective what kind of products are needed in the country right now. And I think some of the big calls were taken when they were not the norm. I mean, like, you know, about investing to make in India. About, like, making sure that we had our own apps when nobody was investing in an app ecosystem. Why is the app so critical for our users? Because it's telling them not just about their health matrix, but it's also, like, nudging them into, like, you know, the right areas.

If you are, like, a person who likes jogging, can I make you meet 10 other people who are of the same mindset and so on and so forth? I think these insights, which we invested upon, made us give that edge. And very frankly, understanding that consumer mindset in India. A lot of times people say that India, I'm like, you know, just price the product low and things will sell. That's absolutely contrary to what Indians love. We like value for money, but we don't want something which is seen as cheap. So we understood that this product has to appeal to the aesthetic sense as well as the functional sense. I see. And to make that happen, I mean, you're talking from customers from Kashmir to Kerala, right? I mean, you're deep into that.

Now, look, you're only eight years old. I wonder what I've been doing in my time in eight years. But tell us about some of the significant big milestones when you broke through, particularly from a brand perspective, Gaurav. When do people start to say, ah, I trust this person to be on my wrist? I think it's been a journey which got boosted because of a lot of macro factors also. We were speaking to Pariksit about the impact that COVID had on travel industry. But COVID also had a big impact in a positive way on this wearable industry. All of a sudden, people got even more invested in health. And that's where I think a smartwatch really became something integral to their daily life as we were struggling with COVID and so on and so forth.

The fact that we invested to make in India gave us the economies of scale. And also, because of that, we were able to pass it on to the consumers. So, all of a sudden, these lifestyle technology products were not out of the reach for the consumers. So, I think these couple of big things really boosted the category. Big make in India push. A bit like Pariksit took advantage of COVID. Gaurav, we're only scratching the surface of this brand story. Thank you so much for being on Trailblazers.