OBJECTIFYING EVERYDAY

A nondescript building in the Information Technology Park in Gurugram, Haryana, is home to one of India’s most popular design and accessory startups. Only an immensely missable, standard nameplate-sized black-on-white “DailyObjects” sign on the building wall confirms this. Similarly minimalistic and utilitarian, the ground floor of this four-floor 50,000 sq. ft space is a large open office with a line of long wooden tables with chairs, a few big-windowed glass cabins along its sides, and a corner with a coffee machine and snacks.

- Vangmayi Parakala

This seems unexpected for a design startup catering to an urban clientele looking for sleek, yet imaginatively crafted personal accessories for functional, everyday needs: laptop sleeves and phone covers, and, lately, in keeping with the times, cable managers as well as wireless chargers for multiple gadgets, smartwatch straps and desk-mats that can accommodate gadgets with personal stationery in compact and cool ways.

The company says it has not only remained profitable but has doubled in scale and revenue to ₹85 crore from FY22 to FY23. In the months since, it says it is set to cross ₹130 crore gross for FY24.

“Yeah, I don’t like filling the walls with cheerful or motivational clutter,” says Pankaj Garg, the founder and CEO. His cabin, too, is consistent with the minimalism—there’s only a skinny whiteboard near the window, a Macbook on a desk-mat on the table. I am intrigued by the only apparent clutter: white, moulded and 3D printed mock-ups of work-in-progress products lining the windowsill. Garg, 42, dressed in a dark blue, linen mandarin-collar shirt and boxy dark blue denims cuffed at the ankle, catches me eyeing them and jumps to his feet: “Come, let me show you around,” he says. “They must also be printing phone covers now.”

The tour takes about 25 minutes: There are karigars (craftsmen) who stitch and stamp, teams for quality control, and spaces for packing orders, display experiments, photo shoots and phone case printers. Garg tells me they can print 2,000 cases every day (about 60,000 every month), and as we walk by rooms with stocks stacked to the brim, he adds they have gone up from having just 15-20 karigars in 2020 to 400 in-house and over 1,000 more on project-basis now. Other than this, DailyObjects employs 160 staffers and has 400 others on contract.