Life-saving technology should be affordable: Komal Agarwal, Pebble

Since Inception in 2013, Pebble is a technology company that strives to create products that are the perfect balance of innovation, technology, and design.

As per an IDC report, the homegrown brand Pebble had significant sales like Boat and Fire-Boltt.Pebble is doing strong marketing promotions, giving aggressive discounts, and multiple launches to dominate the segment.

Domestic brands are playing a pivotal role in making them accessible by introducing relevant functionality and fitness tracking functions at lower price points. The pandemic has re-inforced the importance of fitness in our lives.

The motivation of staying fit and leading a healthy lifestyle is now forcing users to upgrade to more sophisticated wearable devices with greater expectations around improved health tracking.

Ms. Komal Agarwal, Co-founder, Pebble, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview: 

DQ: What are the factors that differentiate Pebble from other smart wear brand? About your unique brand positioning?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: As a brand, we are very focused on the value proposition of our products and the customer experience that we provide to them. We feel that a life-saving technology should be affordable. Our value lies in creating products and advanced technology affordable, yet world-class, in terms of design and tech. 

DQ: Every business faces challenges, have you faced any dark or down phases? How did you overcome it?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: Any business survives only when they listen to their customers’ needs. As a brand, we have been very focused on this from the first day, and that helped us avoid a lot of downs. For us, the challenge is to give our customers, what’s best in every single product that we launch, which makes life smooth and effortless for them.

DQ: In the year 2022, how much revenue you are expecting from the audio and smartwatch segment, compared with your current financial standing?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: We have been growing at a constant rate of 200% YoY. This year, we are looking to exceed that growth, and are very aggressively working towards achieving it.

DQ: According to the reports, brands like Noise and Boat are grabbing the market. How are you trying to keep up with competitor brands?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: We have a huge market to cater to, and we feel the top six brands will continue to grow at a very aggressive rate. As a brand, we would want to stay true to our basics and listen to what our customers want from us. We would want to focus to make our customer experience impeccable. We are providing products that look and feel premium, and bring cutting-edge world-class technology at an affordable price. 

DQ: The Indian smartwatch market registered the highest ever shipments in record QoQ growth 159%. How many units of watches do you sell in this year, and what's your expectation for next year?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: We are one of the top six smart wearable brands in terms of total shipments in India. This year, we have plans of increasing that considerably. 

DQ: Customer is a big factor in the D2C ecosystem. What is the strategy that you follow to stay closer to customers across touchpoints? What were the tweaks that you had to bring in considering the pandemic?

Ms. Komal Agarwal: We take customers’ honest feedback very seriously. It gives us real insights into customer sentiments which is very important for us. Our customer experience team works very closely with the marketing department to create real-time actionable insights. 

The pandemic taught us the importance of communication all the more. It became absolutely necessary and that’s when we started developing and strengthening our communication channels. 

DQ: What is your future plan for expanding your business? 

Ms. Komal Agarwal: We have an aggressive overseas expansion plan this year. We are expanding in Nepal, Bangladesh and Middle East. We are projected to grow at 200% this year as well, but we are looking to surpass that.