Wearable technology is marching towards ubiquity and Indian firms like GOQii, Ducere and Leaf Wearables are expanding the purview of its functionality
But being an Indian company is no walk in the park. “Innovating on ideas based on hardware isn’t hard. The hard part is gaining local confidence,” says Ducere’s co-founder Sharma, 28. This includes gaining the confidence of investors—who are usually hesitant of investing in hardware companies—and convincing them about the appeal of the product.
A common refrain is on making a reasonably-priced product given the price-sensitive Indian market, says Lawrence, 32. “That may be true, but we have always looked at our product, thinking: ‘If I can sit here and buy a product from Cupertino, California, why can’t someone [overseas] buy something made in Secunderabad?’”
And it’s not just plain talk by the founders. Ducere’s shipment of 600 units to its first user group was sent to 37 countries in February. By May this year, the company will be shipping 12,000 pairs of its Lechal footwear, 95 percent of which will be outside India, says Lawrence. However, he believes India will eventually become the company’s largest market. “In the next three years, volumes will increase and the price of products will come down.” The experts concur.
“Wearable devices have just begun their journey towards becoming an integral part of human life,” says Bala Deshpande, senior managing director, NEA India. Deshpande adds that India is leapfrogging on the technology front. “This will require a significant amount of learning across the board—as a consumer and as a provider—as well as some behavioural shifts.”
For its part, Ducere’s learning has been to focus on fashion. If a product looks good, not only does it add value to the wearable device, it also plays another vital function: “With fashion, you’re giving the technology time to evolve,” explains Lawrence.
‘Smart jewellery’ firm Leaf Wearables, founded in 2015, is another company that has found new avenues for wearable technology through fashion. “We didn’t think of creating a wearable technology company to begin with. We wanted to solve the problem of safety [while travelling],” says Manik Mehta, one of the company’s co-founders. Smart jewellery simply presented itself as the best possible solution, he adds.
The Delhi-based company raised $250,000 in seed funding last year. Its flagship brand SAFER includes an assortment of wearable accessories—including pendants and leather cuffs—that can be transformed into safety and tracking devices by integrating them with an app on a smartphone.
Mehta, Ducere’s Sharma and Lawrence, and GOQii’s Gondal agree that the nature of computing is set to change and eventually the computer will be a part of the user’s body.
“It’s not going to be a single wearable that’s going to be the winner. Your shoe is going to talk to your watch, which in turn will talk to your eyewear. The future is going to be a wearable ecosystem, believes Lawrence. GOQii’s attempts to integrate varying facets of health and fitness into its service-led platform are indicative of such a trend. The company is already ‘hardware agnostic’, and its platform is compatible with the popular fitness tracker bands Fitbit and Jawbone, and even an iPhone’s motion sensor. And it has lofty ambitions: “We’re going to be the world’s largest preventive health care platform,” says Gondal.
But can smaller firms create a niche in a space dominated by a few large players with deep pockets? “Given the low product maturity in the present wearable ecosystem and standardisation of various hardware components, it is possible for a new entrant to develop a prototype by being firmware- or software focussed,” says Deloitte’s Sudarshan.
As technology around wearables and the Internet of Things continues to develop at a frenzied pace, India may well see more winners emerge in the near future.
(This story appears in the 29 April, 2016 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)