NEW DELHI : In the April-June quarter, Fire-Boltt, a wearables, gaming and audio brand that offers fitness and fashion products, emerged as the market leader in the smartwatch category. Owned by Boltt Games Pvt. Ltd and incubated by Savex Technologies, the company’s market share was pegged at 28% by Counterpoint Research and 25% by IDC India. In an interview, Arnav Kishore, founder and CEO, Fire-Boltt, said the brand is looking to build loyalty with innovations, new products and competitive pricing. The company aims to touch ₹2,000 crore in turnover up from the current ₹500 crore by the end of FY23, he said. Edited excerpts:
Your company is seven years old, but the brand has grown only recently. What have been the challenges?
When we started in 2015, our vision and mission was to make India fitter by providing the best in segment wearables. Back then, we were one of the first wearable tech companies in India, with very little competition. We innovated a lot with sensor technology on how sensors can track your daily fitness from running movement to speed, and other technical metrics that were helpful for athletes and cyclists. But at that time, the market was very small and new. It was difficult to acquire customers. People didn’t really understand the meaning of wearable tech as such. So, it took us some time to get going.
Following the pandemic, in 2020, was when we saw an opportunity in smart watches where the fitness trackers started to die down and the idea of smart watches started to click. There was a sudden awareness and people started to become more health and fitness-conscious. However, there was a big gap in terms of the kinds of products that are there, with the kinds of features and the price points. That’s where we wanted to position ourselves.
What is the plan going forward?
In less than two years, we have done a lot of work and we’ve become the No.1 brand in the smart watches segment in India. The growth has been a result of a lot of things including the right set of product development. We are very aggressive when it comes to the product strategy. We launched the first smart watch with an inbuilt oxygen saturation tracker, the first Bluetooth calling watch in India and now, we have 30-plus of those in the portfolio.
We also launched the first in the industry superior display watch under the ₹5,000 mark. We are seeing 1,000% growth from last year to this year. We anticipate we should be crossing the ₹2,000 crore and 15 million units plus in sales this year.
Where will the sales come from?
The sales will come from the metros and non-metros. But scale will eventually happen from the non-metro towns because we have a strong presence in several offline channels and have a network of almost 35,000 plus selling points today whether it’s multi brand outlets, smartphones stores, watch outlets or organized retail like Reliance (Digital) and Croma etc.
We are going after the aspirational youth—which probably aspires to buy an Apple Watch but cannot afford to since their pocket does not allow it.
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