In Search Of Consumer Connect

New consumer product companies get cracking.

- Goutam Das

THE PACKAGING ISN’T subtle. One of them borders on comic art with ‘Eargasm in the box’ printed. The products themselves can be loud with a definitive bass bias. That’s when EDM or electronic dance music gets heady. The 20-year-olds love that.

Three-year-old boAt sells earphones, headphones, speakers, travel chargers and cables. Yet, the start-up loathes to be called an electronics company; it prefers the tag of a ‘lifestyle brand’, a cool one that makes fashionable stuff such as cables in camouflage or denim colours for Apple products, portable speakers that are stone-shaped and not the usual egg-shaped, and Bluetooth headsets designed to complement those with a sense of “style, fashion, and craziness”.

Aman Gupta, boAt’s co-founder, who calls himself ‘Captain’, identified the company’s positioning early. Some companies were playing on price, while a few played on perception — top-end audio companies that market quality of sound. “We are somewhere in between,” says Gupta, who started boAt with Sameer Mehta. “Products for 18 to 24-year olds… that was the whitespace.” He implies that no one was really targeting this demographic.