We are not trying to be a technology company: GUESS’ Brett Gibson

American clothing and fashion accessories maker GUESS is poised to enter the Indian market with its smartwatches that pair with Android or Apple phones. The company has made the choice of keeping the dial analogue, with only a small monochrome panel, while rivals such as Fossil, Tag Heuer and Hermes have taken to full touch screen dials. In an exclusive interview with ET’s Deepali Gupta, Brett Gibson, senior vice president-international sales at EMEA Guess and GC Watches discusses the company’s strategy. Edited excerpts:

When do you plan to launch smartwatches in India and at what price point?

March to mid-year. The Indian market is interesting; there is a huge saturation of mobile devices, but there is also a fair degree of price sensitivity in certain segments. I think the category is in an early adoptive phase than a mainstream.

Price will be something to watch and how price sensitive the Indian consumer is. I think it is still definitely a fashion conscious market which plays to our advantage. I don’t think every Indian consumer wants to walk around with the equivalent of a cell phone on the wrists. I think aesthetics is important. We’ll have to see what the adoption rate is and what the correlation of prices is to work out just how that market share can be.

In dollar terms roughly it is a $100-150 difference between the analogue and smartwatches.

What do you expect to achieve in terms of sales in India?

To us it’s not important to sell ‘x’ number of million watches out of the box right now; this is early days. Everyone (selling smartwatches) is in this infancy of working out what this means.

Where will the watches be first available? Are you likely to target smaller towns?

I would imagine there is a logical part to starting in the bigger cities from a control and brand point of view. It’s OK for technology companies to go to the smaller cities because they are doing a lot in pricing right now… In these early days for us, we will probably start in big cities with the higher traffic locations and learn before we roll out across the country. We are testing and finding what is the right channel.

So who will get to sell the GUESS digital watch first?

One of the interesting questions is where wearables should be sold in the future? Is it to be sold in a watch retailer, or is it because it’s smart it should be sold in a technology channel? Retail hasn’t quite adapted yet to finding how this category fits, and that becomes part of the learning process. I think we are not arrogant enough to say we have all of this figured out. Right now this is about credibility, to be in this segment and learn. We are not trying to be a technology company.

Would you consider the e-commerce route over showroom retail?

I think some of it works in reverse, where there is more info commerce done online about learning about the product, and understanding it. Then walking in the door for the transactional piece (rather than) buying (online) the box and setting it up yourself. That can be a harder experience than to walk into a store, have someone unbox it, pair it with your phone, take you through the functions so that when you walk out of the store you already have an understanding of the core functions. You walk out a proud owner than walk out confused and have to figure it out yourself.

[“Source-economictimes”]