Most people misunderstand what it takes to bring something physical into the world. They think it’s about design taste or having a sharp idea. But building a real product is a slow, unglamorous commitment to details that no one sees.
To build Native, we had to stare at problems that didn’t show up in dashboards. We had to care about screw locations, mould parting lines, water pressure tolerances, and the thousand ways something can feel “off” without being technically broken.
When you’re making software, you can change things. You can ship fast. You can fix bugs with a patch. With hardware, every mistake lives on in people’s homes. Every careless choice becomes a thing someone has to live with. That weight is quiet. But it stays with you.
Some days, you feel insane for caring this much.
You care about the travel of a button. You care about the texture of a tray that no one praises. You care that your logo isn’t too shiny. You fight for a snap-fit that reduces one screw. You fight for invisible wins.
And most people don’t get it.
Because it’s hard to explain why you want to redo the nozzle angle at the last minute. Or why you rejected a good-enough tooling proposal. Or why a product delay is better than launching something you can’t sleep next to.
There’s no one to applaud those fights. No trending post. Just the quiet feeling that you did right by the product. That it’ll sit in someone’s kitchen, work silently, and they’ll never think of you. That’s the goal.
Design used to mean UI to me. Figma files. Interactions. Pixels. Native taught me that design is not the interface. It’s the behaviour of the thing. It’s how the object enters a space and how people adapt to it. Or don’t.
We didn’t launch Native to win an award. We launched it to raise the bar. If we did our job right, the next 10 appliances that launch in India will feel the pressure to care more. Native was our proof. That it’s possible to build world-class hardware here. That Indian homes don’t have to put up with mediocrity. That a purifier can feel like a product, not a compromise.
We didn’t stop at water. We launched Smart door locks (more on our locks journey in a different post) and planning more every year.
Not because we want to be a “smart home” brand. But because every home appliance in India deserves to be better. We’re building a culture of making things people don’t want to hide. A culture of design that starts in the field, not in a mood-board. A culture of engineering that doesn’t settle.
Native is not a product. It’s a mindset. And we’re just getting started.
This 4-part story of Native is what I would tell someone if they wanted the origin story. Hope you liked it.