David Vs Goliath - Amit Khatri on how Noise created a niche for itself

India’s wearables market is growing exponentially, reporting a double digit growth in the first quarter of 2022. Noise has been one of the leading brands in this category. Noise is not a traditionally funded organisation, but a bootstrapped company, which has built a brand and now they are touching an ARR of Rs 2,000-crore, effectively in a market which is also flooded by many well-funded Chinese organisations.

The 2^nd edition of IMAGEXX Summit & Awards 2022, the flagship event of Adgully for the Public Relations industry, held yesterday (June 16, 2022) saw a fireside chat on ‘Building leading consumer brands across category in a digital world’, wherein Kunal Kishore Sinha, Co-founder,Value360 Communication, was in conversation with Amit Khatri, Co-founder, Noise. Khatri shared his perspective on today’s market scenario, as well as Noise’s journey and how it has become an example for all homegrown ventures.

At the outset, Kunal Kishore Sinha mentioned about ‘outliers’ – people who have gone ahead and built something, where the traditional way of doing business was completely defied. Noise started off as a mobile accessories brand and moved on to introduce wearables. The brand has been leading this market for the last 8 quarters now.

Sinha wanted to find out how the digital ecosystem has brought in a level playing field for a lot of brands who might be cash-crunched but have been able to create a traction with their audience. He asked Khatri to share the journey of Noise and what was his go-to market strategy when he started to build his consumer brand, especially when he didn’t have the funds to flood the market with mass media campaigns and targeting big consumers there.

Amit khatri replied, “I feel bootstrapping has been a blessing for us because it was not by choice. When we needed funds, those were not available. We started eight years back, when the capital market was not like what it is today. Funds were limited and there were giant Chinese companies in the market. So, we had to build the products that could compete with them. Obviously, we couldn’t go mainstream, so we had to find out areas which would solve problems for people. Therefore, we started identifying categories where nobody was present. Thus, we decided to enter into a category which was ‘wearables’, where there was very less competition.”

Continuing further, Khatri said that the mobile boom was there and so, it was an inflection point when every consumer was moving from a feature phone to a smartphone. This meant that an entire era was going digital. Ten years back, it was all offline businesses for distribution, and now it was digital. We started first from our website, which was B2C. It was very easy, the inventories were very less, you could sell what you wanted, and there were no middlemen. I think that differentiation in product really helped us take an advantage in the age where the bigger brands were there.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete conversation, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffQ5s73fZMs