The Business of Watches [43] Bangalore Watch Company Co-Founder And CEO Nirupesh Joshi¶
Published on Wed, 7 Oct 2026 15:00:00 +0000
While much of the watch industry is looking to India as the next big growth market, Bangalore Watch Company aims to bring watches designed and assembled there to an international client. Co-founder and CEO Nirupesh Joshi gives us the lowdown on where BWC has been and where it wants to go.
Synopsis¶
In this episode of The Business of Watches podcast, host Andy sits down with Nirpesh Joshi, co-founder of Bangalore Watch Company (BWC), an independent Indian watch brand, during Geneva Watch Days. Joshi discusses the evolution of India as both a growing luxury watch market and an emerging source of contemporary watchmaking. Unlike traditional Indian brands that rely on stereotypical design elements like the Taj Mahal or Sanskrit scripts, BWC focuses on modern narratives drawn from cricket, aviation, and India's space program, aiming to appeal to both Indian and global audiences.
Joshi and his wife Mercy Amalraj started the company in 2018 after leaving careers in tech, bootstrapping the venture for eight years before recently raising $1.3 million from family offices and individual investors—many of whom were existing customers. The brand has overcome significant challenges, including finding skilled watchmakers in India and building an in-house assembly workshop. BWC now produces approximately 1,500 watches annually, priced between $1,500 and $3,000, using Swiss movements and focusing on innovative materials like reforged carbon made from captured atmospheric pollution and dials crafted from decommissioned Indian Air Force fighter planes. With 60% of sales coming from outside India, the company has opened its first flagship boutique in Bangalore, creating a community-focused retail experience, and is expanding its collection to include classical dress watches alongside its tool watch offerings.
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Transcript¶
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| Andy (Host) | Welcome to the Business of Watches, the Hodinkee podcast, where we go behind the scenes, talk to the executives and leaders in the watch industry who are making things tick. Today we are in Geneva during Geneva Watch Days, and I'm joined by Nirpesh Joshi, who is one of the co founders of the Bangalore watch company, which is an Indian brand. They are based in Bangalore and they are here in Geneva this week showing off some of their wares. And they're quite a different story in the context of global watch brands. And there's been a lot of chat about India lately. Yeah. So let's let's chat about India as a market. I mean I've been there recently in the past year. Um a lot of the industry is looking to India as the next big growth market. India is getting richer, more people are becoming interested in watches. You know, from your perspective as an India-based brand, you know, where where do you see the India market right now? And then we'll talk about how Bangalore watch company sort of fits |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, that's a great start. Look, uh I there is a lot of excitement about India at the moment. We've been here the whole week and everybody's talking about oh, you guys are from India. This India's exciting, I think with what's happening in the And I'm hearing now that we would very quickly get to the top ten in terms of import and the, you know, the speed of imports and the volume of imports. But at the same time, there's also excitement right now around potentially creating a watch from India and uh potentially presenting that watch to a global audience. A lot of watch companies in India are largely focused on making watches in India and presenting it to an Indian audience with the demographic and the population, I think it's a great business idea. But I think for Mercy and I when we started the brand, the thesis was is it possible to produce respectable quality watches in India and not just position that for an Indian audience but, perhaps for a global audience. Uh we've been on on sort of on that path for the last eight years and I think it's a very exciting time now because uh the tide's rising and that you know, I hope that it's gonna bring all of us up and uh give us more uh uh visibility and momentum which we're seeing happening now. |
| Andy (Host) | And let's talk a bit about the context of the Indian watch industry and sort of you know, where Bangalore watch company fits into that. I've had the opportunity to visit uh Titan, which is a long established India brand. Uh there used to be it's HMT, uh was another um well-known Indian brand. Uh Titan has been growing a lot. Um they're making waves, they're making higher-end watches. But yeah, talk about the you know the history of the India watch market a little bit in terms of uh homegrown uh companies and producers. Aaron Powell |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, I think it's it's great history and that context sort of sets up to what we're trying to do now. About uh 70 years ago, there was a movement in India to do everything in-house in India. Not just watches for that matter. We started making clothing, footwear, cars in India, and in that line also came the establishment of HMT where the government of India felt it right to start making watches in India for Indian people. So there was a partnership with citizen watches in Japan. They brought technology transfer. They also sent some people up to Japan to learn how to put hairsprings together and movements together and escapements together. And they brought a huge CapEx investment in India and started making watches under the HMT name. And they were very popular. They were so popular at a time when people would say, in exchange for my daughter's hand, you'd have to give me a scooter from Bajaj and a wristwatch from HMT. An HMT watch. Um but that was the time. And then with the globalization, that started changing. Uh more of the overseas watch brands started entering India. Titan definitely saw the opportunity to start creating more differentiated watches because HMT at the time was only doing manual wound movements, very simple watches. Titan came up with the quartz mechanisms at the time and they started making a wide variety of watches and they you know the it's a forty year old fantastic journey of a watch company trying to sort of beat HMT and bring up a modern young people's watch brand. And that's what it is today. Titans uh you know, on an average they sell watches at fifty dollar or a sixty US dollar price point. They're getting very ambitious about where they want to push and you know our team has huge respects for a forty year old brand, uh part of the Tata group. Uh they have a lot of respect from a lot of us. Absolutely. and I think that's exciting to see where they're pushing. But the challenge that Mercy and I had, we don't come from the watch industry. We were in tech as you we've talked about it. We lived in uh Boston for a few years and then sold South Korea and then in Hong Kong. I do not have a grandfather's Omega Devil that was passed down to me as a story to talk about watches. I got into watches very late. I I'm a huge aviation and space buff, so I got into brands like IWC and Omega and Brahmont while I was in Hong Kong and that and we always wondered why is there no respectable quality watchmaking coming from India? Of course, there's a lot of volume of watches being produced in India. But there was no respectable quality watchmaking coming from India that we could proudly put in front of the world and say this is this product was imagined in India and this came from India. And the second, if not the biggest uh sort of a gripe that Mercy and I had was the grammar of Indian watch design has always been very stereotyped. There's always a Taj Mahal on the back. There's always a Dev Nagri or a Sanskrit script on the dial, or or worse, an Indian god on the dial. We felt it there may be an opportunity to present contemporary watches that don't necessarily scream, hey look at me, I'm a, you know, I'm a thrift store watch from India, but more contemporary designs um with respectable quality of watchmaking and perhaps present it to a global audience. And that was the original thesis that we've sort of been leading by and we've now created collections that's also very contemporary from a modern point of view. We talk about aviation, we talk about space, we talk about cricket, which is, you know, w fits in right into India. And that's sort of been the story of the brand. And we've grown slowly, steadily over the last eight years in that direction. |
| Andy (Host) | And so let's talk about yeah, you mentioned Mercy, you who is your wife and uh partner, uh Mercy Amalraj. When did you start the brand? How did it start? and let's talk about, you know, how you developed and and where you are now. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah. We lived in Hong Kong. I mean watch culture. Great watch culture. Um small city with um watch brands uh all around you. Uh you can't avoid them even if you wanted to. So we ended up spending a lot of time at the boutiques of the watch brands But we were not crazy enough to throw away our jobs and tech in Hong Kong and then move back home to start a watch company. So we took about a couple of years, two years to actually see if it's even possible to start a watch company. Uh we did a lot of research, spent a lot of time on watch you seek, attended the Hong Kong watch fair to look for suppliers that could potentially make the components for us, just like any other microbrand would. And we eventually in 2016, we moved back to Bangalore, quit our jobs in Hong Kong, and then came back and started putting the foundations of the brand. And we eventually launched the brand in 2018. And it's now eight years uh from that point on. |
| Andy (Host) | And so in one sense, there is an industry already established in India. But what you're doing is quite different. I mean, it it's similar to the boutique brand model that we've seen, you know, there are some American brands, there are French brands, there are brands, other brands from Asia. So how did you go about designing and then sort of sourcing the components Aaron Powell |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yes. When we started eight years ago, we didn't have as much clarity that we do now about where this might be going. So we took probably the path that any other microbrand would take. We would talk to suppliers that could potentially put the whole watch together, or suppliers where they could make specific components. And we realized that the catalogue OEM microbrand model may not be for us. The other thing that was interesting we realized is that we did not want to do the kickstarter route of making people wait six months to get a new watch. So we put all our life savings into the brand to actually produce the first batch of watches. We didn't have customers wait around like uh Kickstarter brands at the time. And I'm talking twenty seventeen, eighteen where this was extremely common to see brands pop up on Kickstarter every every other da So we did it very patiently. We looked for suppliers that make cases, suppliers that made the hands, suppliers that made the dials. We used uh citizen miota movements at the time. And we pulled all of it to Bangalore. We hired watchmakers that could potentially assemble these watches. So we want to do it the right way, and we're happy that we took that approach. But it was very sort of I come from tech and where everything moves so quickly, we talk quarter to quarter product development cycles, but here the product development cycles are eighteen months. Excruciatingly painful for somebody that's not usually used to this kind of development cycle, but n you know, but that's kinda how we did it. |
| Andy (Host) | And um you're not a watchmaker, uh nor trained watchmaker, neither is Mercy. I mean w you know, talk about how d was it difficult to find watchmakers or those who could assemble watches and then I wanna talk about now, you know, uh how uh the brand has evolved and and the various models and model lines you have and w you know where you're sourcing the stuff now. And we'll talk about some |
| Nirpesh Joshi | of the great dial work that you do |
| Andy (Host) | and you showed off at uh Dubai Watch Week uh the last time it was there. Talk about the challenges of finding those people and then uh you know actually assembling independent watches in India. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | That's a great question, you know. If you look at vast majority of people in India from the demand side, at a two thousand dollar price point, which is typically where we play right now, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollar price point, uh most people would go choose uh Tissot or a Longines or It's only a niche that goes after a brand like a BWC for the same reasons that a collector would go after a Baltic or a Studio Underdog or a furlan Marie. It's a more mature audience that seeks out unique brands like this. So that's on the demand side. But in order to cater to that, we have to be realistic about what we can do in-house and pragmatic about what we might potentially want to do in the future. So when we started, we knew that we can't do everything in-house. So we used a third-party assembly setup to because we couldn't find watchmakers. But today, all the 1500 watches that we make and sell today in a year are assembled by watchmakers that are employed by us. It was not easy to find them at all. Sometimes we wonder why we were not in the tech business still, because we could find a random guy walking the streets of Yeah. |
| Andy (Host) | Much more challenging to find people with watch um skills. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Very challenging. But one thing that gave us the inspiration was that both Mercy and I do not come from watchmaking background. We don't come from the watch business, but we had the faith and the confidence that we can build and bring a fresh person Or 15 people today. But the watchmakers definitely come with watchmaking experience. We have repatriated a few people from outside the country who work for the swatch group, brought them back to Bangalore, and we've set up a workshop uh a proper way and that's where the watches get assembled today. Uh but it's taken us uh that's only been around for about eighteen months now, the the in house workshop maybe two years now. But it's took us a full five years before we got to that point So in the early days it was still assembling with a third party, with quality control being in-house. But today it's assembly, quality control, parts production, supervision of parts production with third party component manufacturers. All of that is in house. |
| Andy (Host) | Right. At the moment. And let's talk about um, you know, the the contemporary offerings that you have now in the lineup and then talk about, you know, you are starting to do much more contributing much more in terms of the um the final product and like special dial techniques and and materials that you're doing um with Bangalore watch company. Yeah, talk about that. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | So So the idea was to create a brand that would offer contemporary watches that don't scream with any stereotypes. And we wanted to pick on themes that we believe are very exciting to us personally and, hopefully the same themes would be relatable with a modern Indian identity today. For instance, take cricket. We have a collection called the Cover Drive. It's the only watch in the world where you can use a turning bezel to track over |
| Andy (Host) | Which I would uh you know, I mean I can't really um uh uh understand how a nava timer works, so I definitely bet I I wouldn't be able to do that. Cause yeah, cricket remains although I've been to a couple cricket mat |
| Andy (Host) | Yeah, for the uh uninitiated |
| Nirpesh Joshi | North American audience, it might be a little complicated to wrap their heads around. But think of overs in cricket as innings in baseball. Right. Right. So what if we turn the the turning bezel to track an over in cricket as opposed to you know a timing device? And that was the idea and it was really cool execution of that concept. But the point I was making is that cricket is a very popular sport, not just in India now, in other parts of the world, cricket playing countries. Uh the US now has a cricket league. Uh they're building it out of Dallas. Um it it's's I think called major league cricket. So it's getting very popular now in America as well. We've changed the format of the game. It's not uh excruciating seven days sport anymore. It's now three hours in a new format. Uh that makes it more easily palatable to a lot more wider audience, the timing of the game. For sure. So cricket as an example is a theme that we picked because we were excited. I grew up in Chennai and I pr played cricket on the streets of Chennai So I have fond memories of cricket in my younger days and we know for a fact that that kind of emotional storytelling and narrative based on cricket might appeal to a global audience. And coming from a brand from India is very apt because I think India is probably the best cricketing nation in the world. Um, so stories like that is what we pick on, and there are others like aviation, space, India's doing some very incredible stuff in in the in the arena of space recently. We put a Lando on the south pole of the moon. We've sent satellites around Mars. Um in the last decade alone, we've done some incredibly cool things. We're working on our first human space flight, uh, which is a very exciting program. And I think it was uh necessary for us to create a space inspired line from India, uh, you know, uh Allah Omega coming from an Indian space program angle. So that's the theme that we pick. And I think the these are some examples of the thematics of how we build watches and potentially that might not just appeal to Indian people, but also a global audience, you know, who just likes good watches with good storytelling. And the other thing is we focus on exotic materials and that's something we've done quite a bit. Uh in our aviation line, we uh several years ago we picked pieces of decommissioned fighter planes of the Indian Air Force and we made dials out of it. You know, depends on which side of the fence you're in. Some people like it, some people don't appreciate the idea. It's very polarizing, but there is an element of pride in wearing a watch that uses aluminum from a fighter plane, you know, that flew for your country. And then recently we've been using a lot of meteorites in our space collection. And more recently, I think y you and I talked about that watch. We've taken carbon from the cities of India and converted that into a watch dial in our peninsula collection. This is the first time in the world anyone's done it. It's not you wear this watch and you save ten sea turtles, but it's more of a sustain it's more of a uh reminder of the carbon consequences of our lifestyles today. And uh this kind of material innovation is what I think India stands for today, and these kind of the watches is what I think is more relevant than putting a two hundred year old monument that was built during the colonial history of India. |
| Andy (Host) | That's a that's um it's a sort of perfect |
| Andy (Host) | way to encapsulate it for sure. And yeah, |
| Andy (Host) | th th that that carbon dial is quite interesting. It's a carbon is a somewhat common material uh used in watchmaking, but it's more carbon fiber, and this is um made from captured carbon, right? Uh that yeah. Talk about the process of coming up with that. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, it's I was like eighteen months to two years. So we so what's interesting is that everybody talks about AQI, air quality index. Air quality index tells you how much particulate matter you have in the air that we breathe. And unfortunately, a lot of the Indian cities are not ranking very high in the cleanliness of the air we breathe. In Delhi, for instance, every year in the winter has, one of the worst air qualities ever. Uh I remember Mercy and I lived and worked in China and we spent a lot of time in Hong Kong and other parts. I remember Beijing in 2010 and 11, where you couldn't even get out of the building to go grab a coffee. But today, Beijing and Shanghai have one of the best air quality indices and they turned that around in a 15-year time frame. But unfortunately in India, that's not the case right now. So we wanted to tell this story, again, not from a sustainability claim or a greenwashing angle, but more of a hey, this is the state of the state, you know, can we create an artifact that can go on people's wrists that would remind them of the harsh consequences of our lifestyles today. We found a company in Bangalore uh who captured carbon and took this particulate matter and turned it into physical substances like construction materials and a few other things that's used in construction largely. But we said can you give us this material and we're gonna research to see if we can turn this into a watch dial? It was extremely hard to do because that material is a fine powder. But we figured out a way to sort of mix that powder with resin in a carbon composite. So if you look at the watch, it looks more like carbon fiber, forged carbon dial, which is not new in the industry. Many have done forged carbon cases. Some brands have done forged carbon dials, but this is forged carbon mixed with the carbon that's recovered from the atmosphere. We call it reforged carbon. |
| Andy (Host) | Okay. Um and that reforged carbon |
| Nirpesh Joshi | has unique patterns on the dial. Every dial's unique and it's got its own you can see the carbon sort of the particulate matter across the dial. It's a very interesting watch. Um and I think this is something that's giving us the uh the momentum because a lot of people uh got excited about it. Every time I showed it to people, we talked about this. Um and this sort of is the storytelling angle of a modern narrative coming from us. Aaron Powell |
| Andy (Host) | Indeed. And so, you know, the company is not just uh catering to the Indian market but certainly telling or being drawing inspiration from Indian uh stories, Indian industry, Indian sport, Indian culture, but uh not expressing that in the most uh traditional way. So I mean, h talk about um how this has been financed over the years. I mean, is a independent uh boutique watch brand business something that banks are willing to make loans for or |
| Nirpesh Joshi | I wish I talked to more brand owners before we started the brand. Maybe in hindsight we might not have. We made a lot more money in tech than we do now. I mean it's understandable. but look the reality of that is that a watch company which aims to build a decadal journey is not something that banks would be willing to fund. Of course they would extend a small credit line, but that would only take us as far. So for the last eight years, Mercy and I have simply bootstrapping the brand. We, you know, we built a small team, you know, we built some products that we think are going to give us a very new identity. But the we've been sort of constrained in what we can do because simply we've been self-funding it for all these years now. But right now we be we believe that there's a lot of excitement in India and potentially excitement around brand that can come from India, and we felt that the timing was right for us to take this thesis and potentially scale this business beyond just being a lifestyle business. So we started looking for funding opportunities about about a a couple of years ago, actually. And we realized that a lot of the venture capital in India right now is funding uh direct-to-consumer businesses. Allah Warby Parker, if you know, you know, from from the D2C world as they say, which is very small ticket sizes, extremely high repeat purchase rates and very fast growth rates. Every anybody that's built a watch brand would know that that is a polar opposite of what a watch brand building takes. It's not extremely fast, it's not exponential scale, it's linear, predictable, but it's a high margin, high-profit industry if you do it well and if you execute well. So we changed our direction of where we look for funding, because we quickly realized that typical venture capital may not be the way to do it. So we started talking to family offices. We started talking to individual investors that might want to come in and help us to build a brand from India for this. Because sixty percent of our sales today is outside of India. Right. 60% of our customers are outside of India. And in order to do that, we really needed capital to go outside India and tell the story. We realized as we were on this journey that a lot of our early customers are owners of principals of family offices, our HNI and UHNI customers that typically do investments, angel funding as they're called, and we realize maybe there's an opportunity. We start talking to our own customers who might be willing to come in and not just buy a yet another limited edition watch, but be willing to write a check to be shareholders of the company and investors in the company. |
| Andy (Host) | Right. And that has yielded great results |
| Nirpesh Joshi | for us uh because we've just closed a funding round from our own customers who are family office principals and individual investors, uh just a small crew that came together and now are willing to take that bet on helping us take the brand to the next level. |
| Andy (Host) | Excellent. And so how much uh uh have you raised uh in this funding round? |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Uh we're closing the round at one point three million US dollars. Uh this is the first capital raise for our brand and this is the first time perhaps uh where customers have come together and funded this. I mean, yeah, crowdfunding has always been around, but that small ticket sizes, a couple of hundred people coming together and funding But this is just like nine or ten individuals who are coming together and writing much larger checks in in exchange for equity in the company. And hopefully Mercy and I would be able to execute with the confidence that, you know, that there are people that believe in the story, it's just not us. And it also gives our team the confidence that, you know, we bet on these two crazy people, but now there's a larger number of people that are willing to take that bet and that allows us to build. We're still a small company, but we have huge ambitions. Um I it's it's uh for Mercy and I, it's not a personal agenda to make money out of this. You know, we want to make money with stayed in tech, but this is something we're really passionate about building from India. Hopefully fifty years from now, this brand's gonna stand and say these are one of those guys that changed the narrative for watchmaking that comes from India, right? I mean look at Ming from Malaysia or Fierce from England. They don't g the UK brands don't carry a union jack and Ming has nothing on the dial that says they're from Malaysia. But still they've been able to capture the global narrative and I hope Bangalore Watch Company would be the one to do that from India, and this capital raise allows us to do that. |
| Andy (Host) | Fantastic. And uh traditionally, or at least in the past, you've been direct-to-consumer online, but you have now opened a boutique in Bangalore. Talk about the reasons for that and what you're doing with that space and and and how it's going. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Today uh first of all we use uh Swiss movements today, Salita or La Jou Peret, depending on what collections we have. And we uh these uh pri we price typically in the fifteen, sixteen hundred US dollars all the way to three thousand US dollars. That's our price range. And at this price range, the physical, the tactility of the touch and feel becomes important. Uh still a good chunk of our businesses, consumers from India, when they're putting two thousand dollars on a watch, they have great choices in India now. Every Swiss brand is available in India and in in distribution at a scale that we can't match right now. Every Indian Tier One, Tier Two city, you can now buy any Swiss brand that you'd like. So it was very important for Mercy and I to bring that physical retail concept. But Bangalore being HQ, we wanted to put our first flagship in the city and we found great spot in Level Road, Bangalore. For those who know, it's central business district, uh very close to the airport, very close to all the uh main spots in the city. It's more of a if you know, you know, we're not at the ground level, we're on the second floor. Okay. It's an eighteen hundred square foot space. We have a area where we host watch master classes. We're recording talk shows now at the boutique. People can come in, sit down, have nice filter coffee from Bangalore, talk about watches and learn about the brand. But this is something that's working really well for us. The creating a community around the boutique. We host get togethers now every other weekend. It's not very different from if you look at uh you know what Andrew's doing with Time and Tide in New York or even the happy hours that Hudinky hosts, um this is the same model and it's never been community. Yes, absolutely. It's never been done before in India and we're sort of very happy to bring that sort of concept to to our flagship boutique. |
| Andy (Host) | That's great. And um what have you learned so far in terms of that community? Speaking to the CEO of Frederic Constant um this week, Niels Egerting, and you know, you say India is really doing and that's a brand that's basically in your um uh price point. And he said, you know, really India is real for them. It's doing quite well. What is the India consumer, you know, watch collector, where are they at in their journey and and what are they looking for? And then, you know, how does Bangalore watch company sort of want to be a part of that. Because you're certainly not a band. You know, you you're that's that's part of who you are. That's part of your um your audience and your consumer. But yeah, talk about that. Aaron Powell |
| Nirpesh Joshi | India is a very complicated market. There's many demographics in one. You can't put one sort of template and say this is India. Unfortunately, every city has different tastes. I was talking to another brandowner yesterday and they were saying we're coming to Delhi and I said Delhi might not be the best audience for you. It could be Bangalore because the audience in Delhi wants different kinds of watches and the audience in Bangalore might want different kinds of watches. You can't put a template and say what sells in New York might also sell in San Francisco. What sells in Delhi might not sell in Bangalore, and what sells in Bangalore might not sell in Hyderabad. So it's a very different market. It's very complicated. |
| Andy (Host) | It's big market. It's a lot of people in very different uh cultures in different regions. Absolutely. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Look, we got twenty plus languages mainstream, we got different kinds of food. Every hundred kilometers you travel, you find different food, different language. Not everybody's gonna walk around with a T so PRX. |
| Andy (Host) | which is a very popular watch in India, that'.s the one Absolutely. Yes. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Absolutely. But the point is, vast majority of the country who are able to afford a thousand dollar watch is definitely gonna go for the mainstream. TISO's business is really doing well in India as an example. And so is Longines and so is Radho. India is the number one country for Radh. This is, you know, a lot of people are quite surprised by that. But that that is the state of state of affairs. However, there's a growing population of Indian people that are well traveled, well read. They travel the world, they're exposed to brands from around the world, and they seek out unique brands. And there's a fantastic opportunity for any independent watch brand, not just us, to sort of tap into that demand. And we're seeing now that a lot of independent watch brands are coming in. I see interest in India from collectors talk about Shopek, people talk about H. Moza, people talk about F. P. John. People talk about the burneron in India that people typically might not expect to see. So there is a mature collector's community that goes after independent watch brands at that top level in India. Interestingly there's a lot of excitement for the more affordable, accessible segment of the independent brands as well. I'm seeing a lot of people that walk into our boutique wearing a Baltec MR05 or people might be wearing a furlan Marie or maybe they're wearing um Otsuka Low Tech or a Ming and I see an interest across the board for independence now and that's exactly the kind of audience that we go after as well. A $2,000 BWC is not anybody's first $2,000 watch. Our customers already have the sub, the the speedy and perhaps the Katia Santos and then they come to us because they're already category aware and they want something that's more unique. But there's a very interesting watch collecting culture that's building in India, not just for the mainstreams, but also for the independence. |
| Andy (Host) | Yeah. absolutely. And so, you know, sixty percent of your customers are not in India. What's bringing these people to the brand? Are they are there is there a lot of the Indian diaspora um uh that is part of that group? Is it uh specific designs and themes and collections that they're uh gravitating towards? Yeah, talk about that. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Naturally, right? We'll go the Kia model. The first Kias that were sold in America were all South Korean immigrants, right? We'll have no qualms in admitting that |
| Andy (Host) | the Indian diaspora is gonna be a big chunk |
| Nirpesh Joshi | of what we sell and who we sell to. And |
| Andy (Host) | now I have a Kia. Yeah. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Uh yeah, I I I mean we lived in we lived and spent a lot of time and sold South Korea. I love that brand. but the point is that the you know, yes, the Indian diaspora will become a big chunk of what we sell and who we sell to. Today it is sixty percent of our customers outside of India, and perhaps uh thirty, forty percent of that is the Indian diaspora because they appreciate the storytelling that we do. They appreciate the fact that they can wear a watch from home that is not just a wedding watch, if you know what I mean, right? I mean if the you you wanna you wanna wear something from home that you could wear every day to work, uh you know, to the park, to the beach, and not just wear it with your Indian wedding gown. And I think that was sort of the missing piece we're able to sort of lock into, if I may. But there is also a clear interest from the non Indian, you know, and with someone with an with no Indian background, simply because uh the the design and the storytelling and the watches appeal to them just as any other watch would appeal to them from any other part of the world. |
| Andy (Host) | Right. I mean, yeah, certainly the market and the interest in independence boutique brands, as I call them, uh as you you know, you mentioned uh Ming from Malaysia. Yeah, I mean there there there's much less country specific uh preference in the way that that industry works allows for that now. We're starting to see um other uh Indian independence uh smaller brands come up. I mean, you know, do you take this as a compliment? And should we think of the Bangalore watch company BWC as the sort of the first independent that sort of paved the way for for others. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, look, I mean I'm I don't necessarily take a lot of pride in being the first and anything as long as we do it really well and as long as we're able to build genuine appreciation around the world. But there are a lot of other smaller Indian brands that are popping up. I'm sure you know some are making waves on the internet, on social media. I think it's very interesting. The ecosystem's building. I think people have now realized that it is possible to build watch companies from India and it's only good for us. I see it as a good sign. I wish a lot more small companies come from India and build watches. And I also wish that everybody focuses on one goal, which is something that we've always focused on, is change the mindset of the watches coming from India. I don't wanna be tagged as a Mumbai special. We're not repainted eBay dials, we're not Mumbai specials. We're building genuinely authentic, good quality watches and trying to present it to a global audience. And I wish if there are more brands from India that tag along on that same sort of freight train, I'm happy about that, right? It's a good sign. |
| Andy (Host) | And so let's um look into the future a |
| Andy (Host) | bit. I mean you just showed me, I got to see it in the hand this week, this um quite uh lovely, handsome uh pocket watch uh that you guys made. It's quite classical. You know, I think of you guys really as um it's kind of tool watch sporty um kind of stuff, but this is kind of a new direction for you. So what are we gonna see in terms of you know, future sort of artistic direction, design direction, and then how much more sort of Indian know-how, Indian components, Indian um craft are we gonna see in the in the pieces going forward? Aaron Powell |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, that's a great question. I mean on the supply side, we've always been careful about and we've always been transparent about how we do this. We do have suppliers in India that supply the hands and dials to us today. Our casework comes from outside. Our movements are all Swiss and we do all the quality control assembly testing in-house in our workshop. We're really happy because we now have |
| Andy (Host) | Okay. All |
| Nirpesh Joshi | the watches before they go out. So that that's on the technical side, right? But on the product side, yes, we have aviation, space, cricket, and the outdoors, four core lines right now. We debuted with a dress watch. Actually, interestingly, Stephen Pulverant made a point about that on Hodinkee during our debut several years ago in 2018. It was a very popular watch. We used a Mura 9015, very classic, clean dress watch design. But frankly, Andy, that was a difficult position to defend. We were an unknown entity from India. We were making a dress watch that was great product, but we didn't have any chops at the time for people to see. So it was a difficult position to defend. And we very quickly made the decision, Mercy and I, to pivot to what we thought would be better from a narrative angle to prove our provenance, if you will. Uh then we went on to aviation, space, cricket, and the outdoors where we bring all the design elements into it. And that has helped and I think that's been a good decision for us so far. But now I believe after eight years we have the foundation, so we want to bring some of our classical chops and demonstrate that to the world. And the pocket watch is the first step to do that. It's very clean, vintage-inspired. It's actually inspired by a 1950 story of India after independence, which is why you see the classic cathedral hands and uh you know fifties style dial. Amazing linen dial linen |
| Andy (Host) | type dial, yeah. Yeah. I mean there was a huge |
| Nirpesh Joshi | movement in India of self reliance. We only wanted to use our own clothing, so the linen pattern dial, sort of we call it khadi in India. So that that pattern is a nod to that history there. So very classical pocket watch. And we're now beginning to take a few more steps in that classical angle. We're bringing back a dress watch later this year and it's very classical um and it'll have some more elements that unfortunately I can't talk about right now. But yes, we are we're bringing back a dress watch and once now that we have the foundation of the you know of the different narratives. And |
| Andy (Host) | last thing, I mean, let's talk about price and you know, the price category that you are in. I mean, is that you mean we've talked before about this, is that the biggest challenge for you is making the case for um you know |
| Andy (Host) | uh above fifteen |
| Andy (Host) | hundred to three thousand US dollars um for a a watch that comes from India. Is that the biggest challenge for you or or is that sort of do you think you've now sort of um crossed that hurdle with the help of all these other boutique brands uh that are in the same price category and uh or is or is um something else uh a bigger challenge for you now? |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Yeah, I think it's a great question. I was talking to another j gentleman from the media and this question came up earlier this week, which is I don't believe that the price point is gonna be a problem for the global audience. The price point is definitely a problem in India, frankly, because in India, when people ask us about the brand and we tell them the brand story and give them the price point, there may be questions of why would I buy something from India at $1,500 when I could buy a Swiss made watch at the same price, probably at a 20% discount? But we're not going after that primary audience. We're going after the audience that stops buying the scotch whiskey in the duty-free store at the airport, but starts going for the Indian single malts now. That's the audience we're going for. And that I think is a longer path and a longer sort of a conversion cycle. However, globally, I don't think customers care about the price point as much as they care about what's unique in this as a collector as an enthusiast. Why would I pick a Studio Underdog or a Ming or a Fierce or you know, a Farer, um I would pick a Bangalore watch company for the same reason if it gives me a good product, a good narrative and something unique in the watch that other brands don't offer. And the price point is not the primary challenge. Giving the global customers what they want is the primary challenge as long as we're convinced ourselves that we can offer something unique. Like the dress watch that we're working on right now that's gonna come out later this year. I know we have enough things in that product that's unique that is |
| Andy (Host) | doesn't exist today that will get the |
| Nirpesh Joshi | global consumers watch collectors excited about. Um the price point is a secondary conversation. And I've been surprised this week. I've been showing around the dress watch prototype. I showed it to you, I showed it to a few other people, and people have been surprised at the price points we're aiming for because they're like they gave me a number that's twice as much as what we're aiming for. And as long as we get that confidence when somebody touches and feels the watch, I think price is a secondary concern, not the primary concern. |
| Andy (Host) | Excellent. Well, Nirapesh Joshi, |
| Andy (Host) | thank you so much for joining us on the business of watches and we'll be following the journey of the Bangalore watch company. |
| Nirpesh Joshi | Thank you very much, Andy. It was great sitting down and talking with you always insightful thank you for doing this and that's the business |
| Andy (Host) | of watches for this episode we hope you enjoyed. Pasele head on over to Hodinkee.com where you can join the discussion and leave any comments or questions about this episode or the business of watches in general. Who knows? We might even answer your question on Thanks for listening and see you next time. |