Headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana, the Indian consumer technology brand PLAY aims to design innovative, trendy, and best-in-class smart wearables and acoustic and similar products. Their own brand has a robust R&D team in India, which work upon the consumer feedback and analytics received on their digital platforms and also from their consumer support teams. PLAY products are currently available only in India and UAE. In India, PLAY has online partners. PLAY has introduced a wide range of wearable and acoustic products over the last one year and is constantly innovating in product design at their Design labs in Pune.
In an exclusive Interaction with Jayanta Ghosh, Editor in Chief, DeviceNext, Mr. Hamish Patel, Chief Product Officer, PLAY explains more about products, R&D facility and brand roadmap.
Since its debut, we have seen some aggressive strategy from PLAY, how they have placed its brand position in the Indian market?
We aim to make products with a superior experience. Our extensive data-led analysis through our customer touchpoints allow us to conceptualize and plan products that are forward looking and that fulfil customer aspirations. We are young and don’t mind taking risks to test our hypothesis in certain new segments. Our in-house team of engineers and developers allow us to move swiftly owing to their decades of experience in product development.
What is the key essence of PLAY products?
The key essence of PLAY products is customer’s delight. We design our products keeping in mind that the entire customer experience from brand awareness to post-purchase is effortless and delightful for the customers. We have built internal software tools to facilitate a lot of that experience – eg: PAHS (PLAY at Home Service) enables any of our customers to simply sit at home and contact us for an exchange or repair of products.
Being nimble allows us to move swiftly and quickly introduce products that are ahead in the technology curve. In the audio category, PLAY has its proprietary sound signature with EBEL Drivers (Enhanced Base Extra Loud). Combined with hard-hitting bass and optimised loudness, EBEL drivers make listening to 21st-century music characterized by pulsating beats and massive low end simply fulfilling and more immersive.
We have also built software tools for seamless integration to multiple voice engines like Siri, assistant etc.
How is the journey to date?
At inception, we were very clear that we want to be a brand that is known for its products and consumer-first approach. So from inception until now, the focus has been on working on these 2 attributes.
Our M&A with Riversong has also allowed us to leapfrog our distribution footprint to 45000+ retail outlets in India. Over the last year, we have hired an experienced team and developed platforms that will allow us to keep up with the rising demand of the brand PLAY.
We have set up an in-house team of 40+ mechanical, ID design, Hardware, Firmware, Application and Audio Engineers. We have also made significant investments in research and development to ensure the product quality is not compromised and have partnered with all major Tier 1 chipset providers to work in close partnership with them.
Over the last few months, our focus has been to ramp up manufacturing in India.
What according to you is the key demand in the audio segment, which is still missing from brands? Where PLAY is planning to work
This category is coming off ages from being called accessories to now being known as audio products. With a mature and evolved mobile ecosystem, peripheral technology like audio accessories and products are seeing an upward boom with customer adoption. Customers are looking to upgrade to a superior product experience. This is where PLAY comes in and fills the gap.
Our goal is to offer superior products so our products are not the cheapest but you can expect them to perform to your expectations.
Going Forward
We have an omnichannel sales strategy. We are continuously expanding our offline retail presence which is now at 45000+ stores and also focused on selling our products via digital channels. We have an extensive in-house design, hardware and software team of 40+ employees working on Designed in India products. We have a design studio in Pune.
We will be propagating Indian bred designers and designs going forward. Designing and manufacturing new products in both PLAYGO and PLAYFIT categories.
