They Started by Selling Phone Covers on eBay — Now Noise Is the World's Third Largest Smartwatch Brand
- 5 days ago
- 7 min read
Gaurav Khatri and Amit Khatri grew up in Bikaner — a Rajasthani city more famous for its bhujia and its forts than for producing technology entrepreneurs. As cousins, they shared a childhood in the same streets, the same schools, and the same restless desire to build something. Neither came from a business family. Neither had the head start that the more privileged founders of India's startup ecosystem often arrive with.
What Gaurav had was a hunger for gadgets that bordered on obsession. In 2007, when Apple launched the first iPhone, Gaurav — then a teenager — asked Amit, who was working in Hong Kong, to bring one back for him. That small transaction, a cousin in another country sourcing a phone that wasn't yet in India, planted a seed neither of them fully recognised at the time.
Amit had gone a different route — graduating from NIFT, working as a merchandiser at Orient Craft Limited, and gradually building expertise in global supply chains through his company Transcend Sourcing Ltd in Hong Kong, which became a supply chain partner for global fashion brands including H&M, Calvin Klein, Gap, Marks & Spencer, Zara, ONLY, and Vero Moda. He understood manufacturing, retail, and what it meant to build products that international brands would trust. Gaurav, meanwhile, had trained as a commercial pilot before realising that his true calling lay elsewhere — in e-commerce, in gadgets, in the young, connected India that was taking shape around him.
In 2014, they pooled their savings and decided to build something together.
The Phone Cover That Changed Everything
The idea was modest. India was in the middle of a smartphone boom. New devices were flooding the market — Xiaomi had just launched its phones in India and a generation of young, price-conscious buyers were snapping them up. With those phones came a simple, overlooked need: protective covers and accessories.
Amit sourced 50 phone covers for Xiaomi models from his Hong Kong connections and listed them on an Indian e-commerce platform. They sold out in fifteen minutes.
That result — 50 covers, fifteen minutes, zero marketing — was Noise 1.0. The company was formally incorporated, and the cousins began building a business selling mobile accessories online. By their own accounts, it worked reasonably well in terms of sales and profitability. But within three years, the limits of that model had become clear.
The unorganised market saw several local and small players and the product category was tagged as a commodity rather than a lifestyle need, Amit later recalled. Average selling prices were falling. The product was a commodity. The brand was invisible.
They needed to pivot. And as they looked for where to go next, two things happened almost simultaneously that pointed them in the same direction.
Apple launched its Watch in 2015. Then it launched wireless AirPods in 2016. Both products created categories that had barely existed before — smartwatches as a mass consumer product, truly wireless earbuds as an everyday accessory. Both sold in numbers that surprised even Apple.
Gaurav had a simple observation: if these products were this popular globally, and if the Indian market was still in its infancy on both fronts, there was an open field waiting for a brand that could deliver the same experience at a fraction of the international price.
In 2016, Noise made its pivot into wearables and wireless audio.
The Category Nobody Else Was Building For India
The Indian smartwatch market in 2016 was barely a market at all. A few international brands offered products that most Indian consumers could not afford. The segment was tiny, speculative, and almost entirely unaddressed by domestic brands.
Noise entered with a thesis: feature-rich products, designed for the Indian consumer, priced for the Indian consumer. Not stripped-down approximations of international products — but genuinely competitive devices that offered the capabilities an urban Indian young professional or student actually wanted, without requiring them to spend what a Samsung Galaxy Watch or an Apple Watch cost.
In 2018, the ColorFit smartwatch line launched — a range that brought health tracking, step counting, heart rate monitoring, and smartphone connectivity to Indian consumers at sub-₹3,000 price points. The response validated the thesis. In 2019, Noise launched the Shots — truly wireless earbuds that hit the market at the precise moment that India's smartphone manufacturers were removing headphone jacks, creating demand for wireless audio alternatives. The timing was not accidental; the cousins had been watching consumer behaviour closely and had moved their product development calendar around what they anticipated the market would need.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived — and what had been a gradual growth story became something more dramatic.
With hundreds of millions of Indians working from home, health anxiety rising, and the desire to track fitness and wellbeing becoming universal, the smartwatch segment exploded. In India, smartwatch sales jumped to 26.6 lakh in 2020 and 1.2 crores in 2021. Noise, already positioned as the accessible, feature-forward Indian alternative, was perfectly placed to capture that wave.
By 2020, Noise sold four products every minute, capturing a 27% market share and becoming the market leader.Revenue grew from ₹155 crore in FY20 to ₹373 crore in FY21. By FY22, it had crossed ₹850 crore.
By 2023, Noise had become the third largest smartwatch brand in the world by shipment — behind only Apple and Samsung, and ahead of every other global competitor. A company that had started by selling phone covers on eBay had, in less than a decade, placed itself in the same conversation as the most powerful consumer electronics companies on earth.
Bose Knocks on the Door
The institutional endorsement that marked Noise's formal arrival on the global stage came in December 2023, when Bose Corporation — one of the world's most respected and iconic audio brands, founded in 1964 and still privately held — made a strategic investment in Noise. Regulatory filings revealed the investment was structured as a Series A round of approximately ₹83 crore, through the issuance of compulsory convertible preference shares. Following the investment, Bose held a 2.17% stake in Noise, with the company's valuation reaching approximately ₹3,820 crore.
For a brand that had been entirely bootstrapped until that point — building from savings, from revenues, and from reinvested profits without a single rupee of external funding across nearly a decade — the Bose investment was a statement of a different kind. Gaurav Khatri described the partnership as providing not just capital but access to Bose's deep audio engineering expertise — a collaboration that could help Noise compete at the very top of the audio quality spectrum, rather than only on price.
In the same year, Noise expanded further into new product categories with the launch of the Luna Ring — a smart ring designed to track health metrics with greater precision and discretion than a wrist-worn smartwatch, signalling the company's intent to remain at the frontier of wearable technology rather than simply defending its current smartwatch and audio positions.
The Marketing Strategy That Built a Brand Without Paid Advertising
Noise's marketing journey is one of the most distinctive in Indian consumer electronics — partly because, for years, it operated without a conventional marketing playbook at all.
Building on zero marketing spend. In the early years of the wearables pivot, Noise's customer acquisition was driven almost entirely by the product's own value proposition and by the growing ecosystem of e-commerce platforms. The founders made a deliberate decision: let the product speak before investing in advertising. The quality-to-price ratio of Noise's early smartwatches and earbuds was sufficient to generate genuine organic reviews, repeat purchases, and word-of-mouth recommendation — the kind of distribution that no advertising budget can manufacture.
D2C digital-first distribution as the growth engine. Noise was built as a direct-to-consumer brand, selling primarily through Amazon and Flipkart rather than through traditional retail channels. This D2C approach kept overheads low, maintained close control over pricing and product presentation, and generated customer data that the company used to iterate its products rapidly. The model allowed Noise to achieve national scale without the capital requirements of building offline retail presence — and it meant the brand was reaching India's connected, e-commerce-comfortable youth on exactly the platforms where those consumers were already making purchasing decisions.
Community building as brand loyalty infrastructure. As Noise scaled, community building became central to how it maintained customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive category. The NoiseFit app — the companion software platform for Noise smartwatches — became the mechanism through which the company built ongoing relationships with users beyond the point of purchase, providing health tracking data, fitness coaching, and software updates that made each device more valuable over time. This ecosystem approach created switching costs and retention dynamics that a simple hardware brand could not achieve.
Strategic celebrity endorsement for cultural relevance. Noise partnered with Indian cricket's most exciting young talents — including Rishabh Pant — as brand ambassadors, using the credibility of athletes known for explosive, high-energy performance to reinforce the brand's positioning as a dynamic, youthful, performance-oriented technology brand. The choice of Pant in particular — a wicketkeeper-batsman known for unconventional, fearless play — aligned well with a brand that had itself disrupted a category by refusing to accept that Indian consumers had to choose between affordability and quality.
Strategic partnerships that extend ecosystem reach. Beyond celebrity endorsement, Noise built a series of institutional partnerships that embedded its products into the purchasing journeys of financial and retail ecosystems. The collaboration with SBI Card — where new cardholders received a Noise ColorFit Pulse smartwatch as a welcome gift — put a Noise product into the hands of millions of first-time users who might otherwise not have considered the brand. Partnerships with HRX for a fitness-focused product range extended Noise's reach into the health and fitness demographic. Each partnership was designed not just as a marketing exercise but as a distribution and trial-generation mechanism.
From Bikaner to the Top Three in the World
A decade later, it is a company valued at approximately ₹3,820 crore, with a workforce of over 300 people, products in categories spanning smartwatches, TWS earbuds, smart rings, and audio accessories, and a Bose investment that signals where the brand is heading next.
The cousins from Bikaner who pooled their savings to order phone covers from Hong Kong in 2014 have built something that the Indian consumer electronics industry had not produced before: a genuinely global wearable brand, built from India, for India first, and now increasingly for the world.
Gaurav Khatri has been unequivocal about the ambition that drives what comes next. <cite index="10-1">"When we started, we used to just think about India as a market. Now we're trying to figure out a way to make it India's first brand to go global and make a bigger name there."</cite>
The phone covers are long forgotten. The Noise they are making now travels a great deal further.
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