The Ledger
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Khatri: Selling the cheapest white-labeled electronics is unsustainable
“Doing the cheapest product is easiest. Because you do most of the time white labeling and you can't sustain because there is enough of competition. So the bigger the pocket you have, the more the business you can take.”
Khatri: Fitbit was the only smartwatch option in India initially
“We realized that there's only a Fitbit in India and there's no other option.”
Khatri: Noise achieves sub-5% return rates against 10% category averages
“We hover around under four, five percent return. If you look at our category, category is close to eight to 10% of our return, but our returns are under five percent.”
Khatri: Noise faced a 40% return rate on Tune Elite earphones
“We launched a product called tune elite. I'm sure some would provide we a user also of it. The procurement was not right. The supply chain team did a mistake there. And I think my customer returns were 40% there. So, I mean, I sold 200,000 units, a 100,000 cam…”
Khatri: Marketplace KPIs focus on GMV rather than building brands
“When we work with marketplaces, they drive what to sell. Their KPI is not to build a brand. The KPI is to do GMV for them or get a consumer for the brand.”
Khatri: Noise scaled revenue to ₹800 crore after wearables pivot
“And then on, we pivoted ourselves to a category which was smartwatches and hearable. And from then on, it started, we grew first year, then to one 50 crores. Next year, we more than doubled. From one 50, we moved to three fifty-odd crores. And last year, we wo…”
Khatri: Wired earphones were a high-volume but zero-profit market
“If we had to go for a wired earphone market, then we had to fight with big giants like JBL, Sony, Philips, and we realized that Amit, it is not, me and Gaurav realized that it's not easy for us to do, and if we go at, It's, what do you call it? It's a red ocea…”
Khatri: Noise ranks third in APAC smartwatch market solely via India sales
“We are not selling in APAC and world right now. In terms of size, we are ranked third in APAC. Asia Pacific and in, in the entire globe, if you look at the ranking, we would be number nine.”
Khatri: 20% of Noise's revenue comes directly from its D2C website
“We are one of the largest DTC websites where 20% of the business come from there.”
Khatri: Noise controls 27% of the Indian smartwatch market
“We are the largest brand in the country for last two years for smartwatches. We have close to 27% market share Siddharth, which means one out of every four smartwatch in the country is a noise smartwatch.”
Khatri: Noise is fundamentally a lifestyle brand, not a tech brand
“So, I mean, we are not a tech brand. We are a lifestyle brand. Lifestyle first and tech is an enabler to that.”
Khatri: Noise dumped entire second smartwatch batch due to quality issues
“The first two generation of smartwatches, we had very high returns. I don't remember the numbers, but we had very high returns and you won't believe the second batch, what we've ordered, those are still still lying in my warehouse. Because there were so much o…”
Khatri: Noise operates with no more than 30 active products
“So if you ask me, we don't have more than 30 odd products across our portfolio, which gives the revenue to us.”
Khatri: Noise offline retail grew to 20% revenue share in 2022
“We started offline business this year onwards in 20, 22, what you call. And from now on, from two percent of overall business, it is close to 20% of our revenue.”
Khatri: Noise shifted manufacturing to tier-1 factories used by global brands
“And then we shifted the entire supply chain to a consumer base, which makes for bigger brands like JBL, Herman, Fitbit, sorry. So we are produced in these factories because the processes are already set because they're already making for the global brands.”
Khatri: Noise D2C website lost money for its first four years
“When we started building our website on the day one, it was a painful affair. We made losses for first four years or even breakeven. We never made money out of there, but yeah, it helped us for long term.”
Khatri: Noise grew revenue to ₹42 crore selling mobile accessories
“First year we did a revenue of 12 crores. It grew phenomenally well to next year, 24 crores. Third year, we were close to 24 crores. Again, we were very stagnant in revenue. I mean, we didn't grow because the ASPs were dropping, but the market was growing by t…”
Khatri: Noise allocates 99% of its marketing budget to digital channels
“So we are 99% as organization on digital platforms. Which are like Instagram, YouTube, Hotstar.”