Titan Industries, India’s largest watchmaker, has made a name for itself by attempting something different every year. This has made Titan profitable as well, says Harish Bhat, chief operating officer. Starting April 1, Bhat will take a nine-month sabbatical during which he will write a book on the parent Tata Group. In an
interview with DNA, Bhat explains how Titan has sub-segmented the watch market, selling watches priced as low as a few hundred rupees to luxuries costing a few lakh.
With consumers now looking at a lot many newer brands, do you feel the need to do something different to maintain your dominant position?
We do something different every year. If I take the last 12 months and quote the specific examples of things that we have done differently — let’s take the high price segment, we launched HTSE (high-tech self-energised) watches which can be powered by any form of light. No other Indian brand had done that so far. It was developed by our technology and designed like Swiss craft. It was a sell-out success.
Look at even higher priced watches. In Nebula which is our 18-carat solid gold watch, we launched the first of our palace collection — the Rambagh Palace collection with the maharaja and the maharani watch priced Rs3.5 lakh and Rs3.75 lakh respectively. I don’t think anybody but the heritage jewellers of Europe would have considered doing something like that.
I can’t give the exact sales figures but these watches have been selling out very well in Delhi and Mumbai. The insight we have there is that consumers, particularly at the luxury-end, buy into stories, not into watches alone. Grandeur, to many Indians, is still the palaces, the kings and the queens in India.
In Raga, we launched a superb collection of watches inspired by Indian weaving patterns. We took Banarasi and zardosi and put them on a watch.
Fastrack, our brand for college youth, launched a collection inspired by tattoos. Tattooing is a talked-about subject among the youth. Fastrack has just launched a series of watches called Tees, the T-shirt watches where you can have irreverent messages on your watches just like you do on T-shirts.
Sonata launched a new collection of watches inspired by all the successes that MS Dhoni had achieved and that was again a sell-out success.
Regardless of competition, we keep doing things differently every year. Competition is one part of the story, but the reason we exist in the business is to have a profitable business through creating what consumers want.
For example, competition is not coming into the kids market but we have still launched Zoop because we think there is a large space available for kids watch business in the country.
Do you foresee any change in your market-share going forward?
No, our market share has actually increased over the last few years and it will continue to increase.
What would you attribute that to?
Because we keep sub-segmenting the market. We have Titan, we have Raga, then we have Zoop, and we have Fastrack, Purple, Octane; we have Edge, Sonata, Super Fiber. We have segmented the market so beautifully that for every segment, we have a very sharp offering.
India is a very heterogeneous country. There are so many different consumer segments that for every segment you need different brands, and you need different products to cater to those segments. And I think we have done that very well.
Has the rate of activities and innovations at the company accelerated in recent years?
It has because the consumer in India has changed. The consumer today is living in a far more vibrant world, in a world where multiple ownership of watches has become the norm and not the exception. Maybe ten or 15 years back, many consumers used to own a single watch. Today, consumers are owning three to four watches. That is why, the pace of innovation has to necessarily step up to cater to consumers. The pace of innovation has to do much more with the change in consumer and not really because of the change in competition.
Do you plan to take licensing of more brands?
We have licensing and distribution agreement with three brands — Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, and Fcuk. We plan to add two or three new brands. We haven’t decided which ones, but they are going to be international fashion or premium brands. This is under a separate division but not our core business. The largest business will still be our own brands. Through our multi-brand retail format Helios, we sell 40 international brands priced between Rs5,000 and Rs1 lakh.
You’re fairly premium as a brand. How more premium can you go?
We have done many things to go premium, the addition of sub-brands like Octane and Purple, the entire range of Automatic watches that are priced between Rs10,000 and Rs25,000. We’ll continue to add new categories to take the brand more and more premium.
Brand Titan can go up to Rs50, 000. Nebula can go above Rs5 lakh. But our watches are very reasonably priced. Our lowest priced Sonata watch begins at
Rs225 and goes up to Rs1,475 on the upper-end. Fastrack begins at Rs650 and goes up to Rs3,000. Titan begins at Rs1,500 and goes up to Rs18,000. Zoop is between Rs300 and Rs900. Compare this to the price of a movie ticket in a multiplex. Sometimes these watches are less expensive than a movie ticket.
After being with the Tata group for two-and-a-half decades, will it be easy to switch off from work?
I hope so. I do active writing and I have a lot of the writer within me. It is also a first experience and I am sure I can take it in my stride and do a good job. When I return, it will be at an appropriate role at that time. It depends on the company’s growth plans and what we want to do. I think there are many exciting new ventures too.
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