What Nalla Neram’s Kaalam Minutes Timer Teaches Us About Product, Purpose, And Perception?
6 min read
A brand can best be described as someone’s perception in their mind about you. It applies to a product, a service, an organization, or even just an idea. The sentiment can best be summed in a quote by Jeff Bezos, which goes, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
So, when building a brand or product is a deliberate effort to yield a desired perception in someone else’s mind, you are required to be successful in meaningful distinction. That’s very important. Being favorably distinct is an ideal blueprint to shape the right perceptions and usually the said is realized via three components: what, how and feeling.
Being clear in “what” you serve for a certain price, “how” you’re better in delivering that, and what’s the “feeling” you serve from the complete entity, helps build the best product. As a keen observer of things, I found the blueprint in practice in the realized products of the watch microbrand - Nalla Neram.
In a saturated space of many chronographs, it’s rare to successfully achieve multiples in distinction. Nalla Neram’s Kaalam Minutes Timer attains the said in the following: its unique value proposition, its self-assured independence, the quality of mechanical content as well as the little color quirks that tend to be the era’s zeitgeist.
So, here’s a lesson in the simple blueprint of a successful product explained via the example of the Nalla Neram Kaalam Minutes Timer.
What Does The Product Signify And What It Delivers?
It’s proven by practice, and also validated by Forbes, that more than 50% of purchasing decisions tend to be influenced by a product’s recognition. Hence, the establishment of a unique identity isn’t only fruitful, it becomes necessary for survival. But how do you distinguish a product which forms yet one more component of an already over-saturated environment where the masses gravitate towards a certain specific style.
Yes, you do it via meaningful distinction.
But mind it, it doesn’t help when the factors of differentiation are realized via a lazy exercise labeled as creative or technical novelty. There needs to be legitimacy in distinction and the Kaalam Minutes Timer has an abundance of philosophical and technical markers to validate the said to its merit.
The timepiece, in its whole, is best perceived as a genuine novelty which is the yield of a deliberate exercise to find authentic philosophical purpose and aesthetic nuances both rooted deep in Indian culture.
In its symbol, the Chakra, which represents time, balance, and life moving energy, it finds itself as not only the brand’s logo, but as a repetitive aesthetic and philosophical entity that even drives the key mechanics, via its depiction on the rotor. This eternal wheel of time even serves as a mechanical portrayal of the never-stopping and perpetual sentiment of the continuous passage of time on the dial at 9 o’clock where it serves as a petite running seconds display. The dial also gets an asymmetrical tricompax layout with a 30-minute counter and a 12-hour timer at 3 and 6 o’clock positions respectively.
In another of what the watch delivers, a focus on its technical markers is called for. As a competent self-winding column wheel chronograph with a peppy dose of orange on its dial face, the watch derives its driving force from the La Joux-Perret L112 caliber. Here, it beats at a satisfying 28,800vph and delivers 60-hours of autonomy.
With the mechanics deemed suitable for reliable enduring performance, it’s in its little quirks that the timepiece shines. The suggestive cultural markers, of which the dual concentric minute rings with every third minute marker in orange form a chief highlight, speak of the timekeeper’s cultural sensibility. This is a reference to the period of “trunk calls,” when long distance phone calls in India were limited to three minutes.
Despite very suggestive India-specific references, the timepiece is undeniably suited for wider appeal. So, as to the “what” of its deliverables, the Kaalam Minutes Timer seems pretty covered via its serving of quality timekeeping via competent mechanics and genuine philosophical markers.
How The Watch Does It Better?
It’s an open debate that what’s the world’s best chronograph wristwatch. Without naming names, we all know a few that make the usual discourse on the said. Nalla Neram doesn’t necessarily vie for the same. In its existence, however, it sets for itself a different target. That’s what will define how it's favorably distinct.
While the mechanics credited to function its chronograph have already been merited as decent, above and in general as well, it is in its attention to detail where we derive a reasonable response to how it is better.
The Kaalam Minutes Timer is fashioned out of 316L stainless steel in a 39mm case that’s very architectural in its build, in addition to offering water resistance of 100 meters. Rounded bezels, distinct and short lugs with sculpted recesses on their sides, square pushers and detailed flanks form the chief hallmarks of its hardware. Very unique, here, is the choice of a boxed sapphire crystal, not only for the usual front side, but on the caseback as well. While the latter serves the obvious purpose of allowing the chronograph caliber to be admired, it also lowers the overall footprint of the watch’s contact on the wrist, making the domed crystal be the most of what you feel when you strap on the watch, rather than its metal components.
Now, that’s sensible thinking favoring comfort, which’s usually an afterthought in watch design and ergonomics.
As a product, the Kaalam Minutes Timer has successfully bagged design patents in Switzerland and the European Union as well. To be able to realize patent-worthy novelty in a nation where the tradition has been in practice from multiple centuries, speaks of the volumes of nuances to gain from this watch.
While styling, in general, is definitely subjective, it makes a statement to have an honorable accreditation for your product and as Coco Chanel famously remarked, “to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”
How It Makes You Feel?
What years of R&D and intricacies in manufacturing yield as a final product mustn’t only be solid on its spec sheet. While that’s definitely an incentive, but for the buyer, there’s more to it than just that. A wristwatch of a certain pricing segment becomes a legacy purchase. The way it interacts and engages with its wearer is an important marker of its true perceived value.
When a country like India poses as the next big growth market for the entire luxury watch industry, thanks to an expanding middle class and increasing consumer spending, an equivalent impact of a global scale from Indian horological endeavors is something necessitated as a follow-up objective.
Brands such as Nalla Neram bear the mantle in this regard. With strong relevance to India, not only restricted to the founder Krishnamani Raman’s origins, but also realized via the philosophical blueprint for the brand’s debut timepiece, it advocates a rare but equally important impetus via its opus.
By embedding Indian philosophy (Nalla Neram in Tamil means auspicious time) into Swiss-made horology without chasing Western acclaim, the brand challenges, not as a deliberate tactic but as an organic consequence, the industry’s Eurocentric norms by succeeding on creative and technical merits alone, of which the former are India-inspired. In doing so, Nalla Neram makes me even prouder to be Indian.
No articles found
