Gaurav Mehta of Jaipur Watch Company share his strategy for success during corona times:
Faced with what has been a most traumatic year for most businesses, a small enterprise dealing with the luxury and fashion sector, the Jaipur Watch Company, founded by Gaurav Mehta not only survived the zero-sales lockdown period but also managed to notch up a profit for his company. Gaurav Mehta of Jaipur Watch Company share his strategy for success during corona times:
How did the pandemic and the consequent lockdown affect your business?
Once the lockdown was imposed last year, April, May and June were zero sales months. We drew a complete blank as far as sales and even show of interest by consumers was concerned. However, I had kept my work force together and I decided to take a positive approach. I realised an out of the box approach was needed to improve sales by taking a different and planned approach. When one avenue dries up, one has to look for others. These are stressful times but my one advice to small entrepreneurs is stay in the game. If you are good at what you do , keep doing it with some innovations to adjust to this difficult period. Opportunities will come back. Devise a suitable strategy. Innovate. Adapt to challenge. Change your thought process. Hold back to aggressive expenses. These are measures that will help you keep your business afloat.”
How did you evolve a survival strategy for your business at this difficult time?
I decided to tap that resource. We dug out all the data of sales from the past seven years and bifurcated this information into High Ticket Purchases and Low-Ticket Purchases. I put my sales teams on the Low-Ticket list and I decided to handle the High Ticket clients myself. It was painstaking, I interacted with each of them over telephone, emails, What’s App and video calls. The response was very encouraging, and my clients were eager to know about my new launches and even were keen to discuss new ideas for bespoke watches. I found I had enough orders to keep my business going despite the stressful situation. Initially during the lockdown, we had shut down our factory but then gradually reopened. Our design and sales teams were working all through.
Did you launch any new products and if so, how were they received?
Two new products that were launched post the lockdown did extremely well. These were the Jumping Hour, priced at Rs 50,000 and the Ladies Filigree Coin watch priced at Rs 27000. The sales of the new products were not fuelled by event based demands like wedding shopping but instead my clients bought watches for themselves because of the fatigue of being in a situation where socialising and travelling was heavily curtailed. Many people also had money to spare which they would have spent on these activities but could not and they invested this money in a purchase that was fashionable as well as an aesthetic piece of jewellery. We offered them the enjoyment of a luxury shopping experience at a very personal level.
What is the one major change in strategy that proved to be a gamechanger for your business?
The other major change I made was to take my company online. Until August last year Jaipur watch Company had no e-commerce presence. The pandemic forced them to turn to e-commerce. Going online with a good website and investing in social media brought us very good results and we were selling almost a hundred watches a month. We are also doing a lot of digital marketing and social media collaborations such as collaborating with Hollywood for our luxury watches and tying up with two new Hollywood releases like The Courier and The Father. JWC is running contests for these movies and creating watches with memorabilia and logo from these movies.
Much of the company’s sales which earlier was concentrated in metros is now coming from tier two and tier three cities reveals .Going online opened up this huge new market for us. We were surprised by the results. It helped that we were offering an exclusive product. No one makes bespoke watches. Creating a bespoke watch is a very personalised experience and the client enjoyed being involved with the entire process of creating it. We stayed in constant touch with each client through video calls and 3D video of the product and we had 100 percent satisfaction from our clients. Again, most of it was for personal use and not for any occasion. It was a sort of revenge shopping to beat the pandemic fatigue.
Why do you think consumers are again showing interest in shopping for personal items such as fashion/luxury accessories or jewellery?
The long duration of isolation and lack of socialising is resulting in a resurgence in the luxury and fashion market. People are indulging in buying something nice for themselves just to keep their spirits up and to indulge themselves. The wedding and events market is yet to pick up and this new resurgence of the virus is affecting this market in a big way. It will take another year for this market to recover. However, he says corporate business is another new area that he has tapped into with great success and that is making up for the wedding market slump. We secured orders for 1000 watches to different companies. We had never thought that corporate sales figures would be better than our direct sales figures. That was a learning experience for us.
Soon, once the virus is beaten, Gaurav has a line up of new launches and even plans a global reach out and take the Make In India initiative not only to his own countrymen but to an international audience also. He signs off with a smile, “I am surprised and happy that our sales for the last year were kind of better than the year before. In a pandemic year, that’s surely something to be proud of!”
Source: Business World
