Bangalore Watch Company's Growing Reputation

Bangalore Watch Company has a growing reputation among watch aficionados in the country for their speciality watches. As the company turns five, we speak to co-founder Nirupesh Joshi on the challenges of building an Indian-origin watch brand

- Murali Menon

In 2014, when Nirupesh Joshi and Mercy Amalraj were trying to gauge the Indian watch buyer's appetite for a quality, made-inIndia watch, several people in the trade told them not to bother with it. Nearly everyone the husband-and-wife duo - former Hong Kong-based software consultants met with dissuaded them from starting an Indian-origin watch brand. They were told that their company might not even "see the second year in business."

The advice went unheeded, and 2023 marks five years of the Bangalore Watch Company (BWC). Today, the outfit, India's first independent watch brand, sells five collections of automatic watches, with prices ranging from Rs 45,000 for the dressy Renaissance Automatic, their first watch, to Rs 79,680 for the Apogee Deepspace, their space and ISRO-inspired timepiece. Prices for BWC's limited editions, such as the recently released Synchro, a tribute to Indian Airforce's Suryakiran aerobatic team, are available on request.

BWC's watches, which use Japanese and Swiss automatic movements, are driven by stories: the Renaissance, launched in 2018 and its first watch, pays homage to both Bengaluru and the HMT era; the Mach 1 pilot watch is a nod to the MiG 21; and Cover Drive references the game of cricket. The company, which sells over a thousand watches a year and has patrons in about 30 countries, recently opened its studio in Bengaluru. Its patrons include aviation geeks, Supreme Court lawyers, and businessmen, says Joshi, who was in Mumbai in early December for an open house. Here, he talks to MW about the singular challenges he and Amalraj faced while setting up a modern Indian watch brand, the evolution of the Indian watch buyer, and the company's future collections.