The iPhone launched in 2007. If you think about it, Apple didn't need to explain itself much about what a premium phone felt like because buyers already knew. The signals of good quality and premium were established with Sony, Nokia, and BlackBerry. The weight of the phone in your hand. A good textured or metallic finish on the back or the satisfying click of a Nokia button, the crisp text on a BlackBerry screen, the particular thud of a Sony Ericsson closing its slider. Buyers had enough exposure to quality hardware that when something better arrived, they could feel the difference without being told what they were feeling.
India's new hardware brands are trying to do Apple-style communication in a market where that reference point doesn't exist yet. Do you remember what the gold standard of true premium quality in RO water purifiers or in door locks? No, right? Apple sells the feeling and skips the spec sheet. The problem is that feeling requires a comparison, and Indians growing up never had a domestic gold standard to compare against.
Parents would refer you to Japanese brands: Sony, Panasonic, National. Sometimes a German one. Hardly ever an Indian one. Sujata mixers were a genuine exception, built like they intended to outlast the kitchen they lived in, and they often did. But run through the rest of the appliances in any Indian home from the 80s or 90s and the honest answer is: the thing we aspired to was always made somewhere else. The Indian-made option was what you bought when you couldn't afford the real thing, or when the real thing wasn't available.
That's not a small gap to fill. A buyer who grew up without a domestic quality reference doesn't have a calibrated eye for what Indian-made could mean at its best. They have a price anchor and a lot of suspicion. When a new Indian brand shows up with a considered surface and a premium price, there's no prior experience that says: this is what that looks like when it's real. There's only the memory of the times it wasn't.
Onida's devil mascot was genuinely clever advertising. The television underneath it was whatever Onida could build within the constraints of available components, protected from the kind of competition that would have forced the picture quality to improve. BPL was similar. Videocon similar. These companies didn't have incentive to prioritise quality improvement. When Sony televisions started appearing, the Indian market didn't gradually prefer them. It switched, fast, everywhere it could afford to.
This transition established that if it's Indian, it's the 'compromise' option. Companies that had spent forty years competing on nothing suddenly had to compete against imports. The rational move was to cut costs further, not to build better. The conviction got reinforced.
This is the starting condition for every Indian hardware brand operating today. A market carrying forty years of accumulated skepticism about what the words "Indian-made" mean when they appear on a box.
Somewhere in the last decade, parts of Indian consumer hardware learned a trick that made this worse.
A product could look well-thought of, with matte finishes, restrained minimal typography, and weight that felt right, and be hollow underneath. The surface decisions got made. The internal ones didn't. You'd buy it because it looked right, and eight months later you'd have a specific opinion about Indian brands in general, and it would not be the opinion the brand was hoping for.
Buyers noticed the difference could loosely articulate as: "I'll just get the Philips." Or: "the imported one is only a bit better." Or the version I've heard most often, from people who can absolutely afford something better: "it's fine, it doesn't have to be good, it's just for the house."
That last sentence is the thing. It's just for the house. A buyer who has decided, in advance, not to expect anything. Because expecting things from Indian products has, enough times, not worked out.
This is what a broken market looks like from the inside. The bar of quality keeps lowering without the builders announcing it but the customers gradually absorb this deterioration.
The founders who are trying to fix this are doing so inside a system of incentives that is genuinely difficult to navigate. I want to be specific about this, because the usual version of this conversation stays abstract.
Take Matter Kit certification. Matter is the connectivity standard that lets smart home devices from different manufacturers talk to each other reliably: your lock, your purifier, your AC, your lights on a common protocol. In 2026, it is table stakes for any smart home product that is serious about a three-to-five year product life. Without it, you're building a product that will be stranded when the ecosystem moves, and it is moving.
Getting a product Matter-certified costs roughly ₹6–10 lakh* per year in licensing and about ₹200-400* per SKU in testing, documentation, and certification fees, plus annual Connectivity Standards Alliance membership, plus the engineering time to implement the stack correctly, plus the ongoing cost of maintaining firmware compatibility across standard updates you don't control. This is before you've changed a single physical component. It's purely the cost of doing the standards work that the product needs to be taken seriously by the ecosystem it wants to live in.
None of this is on the box. A buyer standing in front of two smart locks, one Matter-certified and one not, sees two locks. The certified one costs more. There is no clear mechanism by which the buyer can read the difference. The company that made the investment gets no price premium. The company that skipped it undercuts, moves more units, and the market registers this as the correct strategy.
This is a story about reasonable founders making reasonable decisions. Most of the founders I know in Indian hardware are thinking about this stuff seriously. The problem is that serious thinking and quarter-by-quarter financial reality are running on different time horizons. A company without a ten-year balance sheet to amortise quality investments against is being asked to make decisions that only make sense over ten years. Most of them don't have that runway. So they make the rational short-term call. Multiplied across the ecosystem, those rational short-term calls add up to an industry that keeps under-delivering on the thing it needs most, which is buyer trust.
The Matter example is one line item. Add other quality certifications done thoroughly rather than minimally. Add proper ingress protection testing, the ₹60–80 per unit component quality decision that compounds at scale, the supplier relationship that takes eighteen months to develop and produces consistent tolerances. Add a customer service operation that can handle a firmware issue in a product three years out of warranty. Every one of these is invisible to the buyer. Every one of them is easy to skip when you're behind on your monthly sales target.
The eventual result is a market that has trained itself to expect less. Through the correct optimisation of individual incentives inside a system where quality is invisible and price is legible.
There is a version of this argument that says the buyer is the problem. If Indians demanded more, companies would build better. I've heard this and half-believed it at various points. It's mostly wrong, and the reason it's wrong is that you cannot demand what you have no reference to imagine.
A buyer who has never held a product where every surface decision is evidence of an internal decision doesn't know that's a thing that can exist. This exists for products from Apple. They know the product works or it doesn't. They know it looks premium or it looks cheap. They don't know that the weight of the button and the tightness of the enclosure and the quality of the power supply inside the wall are all part of the same argument, all downstream of a single decision someone made about what standard to hold themselves to.
This is the literacy problem. Indian buyers haven't had enough exposure to the real thing to know how to read it when it arrives.
Which puts the burden back on the supply side, at least to start. The companies that build quality visibly, that make their internal decisions legible at the surface, are doing the demand-side work as much as the supply-side work. They're training buyers. Every product that makes its quality readable raises the floor slightly, through the accumulation of experiences where the buyer touched something and thought: oh, this is what that feels like when it's real.
A few companies are doing this. It's worth being specific about which ones and how.
In my opinion, Ather is the most fully worked example in the current wave. I've had one for five years. It has needed nothing. I mean it has asked very little of me for five years of daily use, which for an electric scooter in Indian conditions is a specific kind of proof. The panel gap on an Ather is a manufacturing specification that someone fought for through multiple tooling revisions and supplier conversations and probably some difficult internal arguments about where the cost was coming from. Most buyers don't consciously notice panel gaps. I still see it countless cars on the road who have inconsistent panel gaps. The eye reads precision as evidence before the brain has an opinion about it. An Ather sitting next to a generic electric scooter at a showroom is making a credibility argument: we held ourselves to something, and you can see that we did.
Ultrahuman does the same thing differently. My wife has been using the Ring since 2024. I used it before her, and I've since recommended it to six more people, which is the most honest product endorsement I know how to give. The machined titanium finish is not the product's primary value proposition. The sensor accuracy and the sleep data are. But the finish earns the first thirty seconds of trust that the sleep data needs to be believed. The quality is unmatched.
Mokobara is another favourite example. They understood the problem at a category level and picked their ground carefully. Luggage quality is immediately legible. You feel the zip, you look at the stitching, you extend the handle. The gap between a good bag and a cheap one is verifiable at the store in under a minute. I switched from Samsonite two years ago. That alignment between what the brand says and what the product proves is exactly what "proud to own" actually means, stripped of the marketing language.
DailyObjects is doing it in a category where the design margin is less and the buyer decision is more casual: phone cases, desk accessories, carry goods. That they're taking CMF as seriously as they are at that price point suggests something. There's a cohort of Indian buyers who are ready to read quality if someone builds something worth reading. The demand exists. It's undersupplied. We currently have more than 10 DailyObjects products that we proudly gift to our friends and family.
This is new. Ten years ago the default was to design things that looked vaguely European: matte black, sans-serif, minimal, references borrowed from somewhere else. Which meant the surface of the product wasn't saying anything about the product. It was saying something about the mood board. The current wave's best work is trying to find a visual language that comes from the product's own quality decisions. That's much harder. It's also the only version that lasts.
"Proud to own" gets used a lot in product conversations, usually as a feeling to design toward. I want to say what it actually means structurally, because the design-toward version tends to produce things that look premium rather than things that are actually premium.
Proud to own is the feeling that the object in your hand has been thought about at every level, that the weight is what it is for a reason, the texture is what it is for a reason, the way it ages is something someone modelled before it shipped. It's the feeling that you could take it apart and find the same care on the inside that you see on the outside. Assume that customers never take their products apart. But they can feel whether that would be true, the same way you can tell a well-made piece of furniture by the parts that are hidden from view. The joinery quality behind the pull-out drawer or the finish on the inside face.
This is what Apple was doing in 2007. Making products where every surface decision was evidence of an internal decision. If the quality bar is genuinely met, then the job of the brand becomes making that quality legible to the buyer who hasn't looked inside. Marketing becomes that translation. You're pointing at something real rather than creating an impression of something real.
India is not uniformly at the quality-bar-met stage. The honest version of this argument is that we're at the stage where a small number of companies are building to a standard that could eventually support that kind of communication, and a larger number are making the surface decisions without having made the internal ones.
The brand-building implication of all this is something founders tend to skip to before they've done the harder work.
The temptation, once you've built something genuinely good, is to communicate like Apple. Sell the feeling. Run the campaign with no product specs, just the object on a clean background and an emotion. This works when the buyer can already read what they're looking at. It fails when they can't. A buyer who hasn't been trained to see the panel gap as evidence will not be moved by the photograph of the panel gap, regardless of how good the lighting in render is.
The sequence matters actually matters. First, make the quality visible in the product itself, physically present, verifiable without expertise, legible at the moment of first contact. Then the brand communication can skip the explanation and go straight to the feeling, because at that point the feeling is honest. The product is earning it in real time. The communication is confirming what the buyer is already sensing.
Companies that run the Apple playbook without having done the Ather work end up with beautiful marketing and a growing service backlog. Indian hardware has produced this outcome enough times that buyers have developed an immune response to it. Considered aesthetics now trigger suspicion in a segment of buyers who've been burned. Which is a real problem for the companies that have actually done the internal work, because they're paying a credibility tax for the ones that didn't.
This is why the ecosystem argument matters. A market where quality is consistently visible raises the buyer's ability to read quality. A market where quality is occasionally visible and the rest is performance trains buyers to distrust everything. Individual companies cannot fully control which market they're operating in. But they influence it, cumulatively, more than they tend to think.
There are people who would read this argument and conclude: so the solution is better marketing. Teach buyers what to look for. Content about craftsmanship. Educational videos. Comparison videos. Factory tours. The "made with care" story told loudly enough and long enough that it sticks.
That's downstream of the actual work. Marketing can accelerate buyer literacy once the product is doing its job. It cannot substitute for the product doing its job. The buyers who can now read an Ather panel gap didn't learn from an Ather marketing campaign. They learned from the Ather. The campaign confirms what the product taught them.
The implication for founders is equally uncomfortable. The communication problem you think you have is mostly a product problem. If buyers aren't responding to your quality story, the question is not how to tell the story better. The question is whether the story is true in every place a buyer's hand or eye will actually go. The packaging seam. The cable that comes in the box. The setup experience at midnight when they're tired and the instructions are ambiguous. The response from support eight months later when something goes slightly wrong. The quality argument is either present at every touchpoint or it's absent. You don't get credit for the surfaces that are good if the surfaces that aren't good are the ones buyers find first.
I wrote about Korea's hardware story. Korea built design credibility over fifteen years. Samsung's Chairman declared the shift in 1993 and it took until the late 2000s before you felt it consistently in the products. That is not a useful timeline for a startup with an eighteen-month runway. But it is a useful reminder that this is a long commitment, and companies that optimise every quarter for survival without a ten-year quality commitment will still be having this conversation in 2035.
The companies that will not be having this conversation in 2035 are the ones making investments right now that won't pay off until 2030. Matter certification. Consistent tolerances with over-investment in moulding and team. A service network that treats an out-of-warranty repair as a branding opportunity rather than a cost to avoid. These decisions show up in a buyer picking up the product five years from now and feeling, without being able to say exactly why, that this was built by people who intended it to last.
India makes things. More things every year, better things in more categories. The engineering base is real. The ambition of the current wave of founders is real. What we have not yet built is a shared expectation of what Indian-made means. A cultural conviction that a product made here can be the best version of that product, not the affordable version of something made elsewhere.
That conviction gets built one product at a time. By companies that decide, before the tooling is cut, that they will hold themselves to a standard the buyer can feel. By buyers who, after enough exposure to products that kept their promise, start to update a prior that has been running on decades of disappointment.
The question sitting in front of every Indian hardware founder right now is not really about design. It's about what you believe the product is for. If the product is for this quarter's sales number, you will make the decisions that serve this quarter's sales number, and the market will stay where it is. If the product is for a buyer who should feel, five years from now, that they made a good call, you will make different decisions. Some of them will be invisible to everyone except the buyer who picks it up and thinks: this is made well.
That thought, repeated enough times, is how a market changes.
India has not yet decided what it wants to build. Some companies have. It shows.