Made In India, Made For The World: Meet The Minds Behind India’s New Watch Brand Rotoris
6 min read
A quiet shift is underway in the global watch landscape. While Switzerland continues to dominate the narrative of traditional horology, a new generation of independent brands around the world is redefining how watches are imagined, built, and experienced. From Japan to the United States, small but ambitious teams are creating watches with strong identities and personal philosophies.
India, too, is beginning to enter this conversation. Among the most intriguing of these emerging names is Rotoris, a young watch brand founded with a clear ambition: to create a globally competitive watch company from India. But Rotoris is not simply another product launch in an already crowded market. It is the result of three distinct yet complementary minds coming together each bringing a different perspective on design, engineering, and brand building.
At its core, Rotoris is shaped by the combined vision of Founder and CEO Aakash Anand, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer Prerna Gupta, and Founding Member and Horologist Harman Wadhwa. Together, they represent a rare blend of entrepreneurial scale, creative brand building, and technical watchmaking expertise.
A Founder Who Knows How to Build Brands
For Aakash Anand, the journey to watchmaking began in an entirely different world: fragrances. As the founder of Bella Vita, Aakash built one of India’s most successful consumer fragrance brands, eventually scaling it into a global player before exiting the company at a valuation close to $1 billion.
Yet the lessons he took from that experience extend far beyond the category itself. “Building Bella Vita taught me that the most powerful brands are not built around products, but around how people see themselves when they use them. Fragrance is deeply emotional people wear it as an invisible expression of identity. Watches, in many ways, play a similar role,” explains Aakash. For him, a watch is more than an object that marks time. It is something far more personal. “A watch is something you look at dozens of times a day. That repeated interaction gives it a unique psychological power. Our intention is that every time someone glances at their Rotoris, it quietly reinforces a mindset of progress of becoming more.” That philosophy shapes the positioning of Rotoris: a brand built not just around horology, but around ambition and personal evolution.
Designing A Brand With Global Intent
While Aakash focuses on vision and scale, the creative architecture of Rotoris is shaped by Prerna Gupta, the brand’s Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer. With a background in strategy consulting at Grant Thornton and experience building consumer brands through ventures such as À la Folie and Sonder Fragrances, Gupta brings both analytical rigour and creative instinct to the company. Her role spans brand identity, design language, and the strategic thinking behind how Rotoris presents itself to the world.
But moving from advising companies to building one has fundamentally changed how she approaches decisions. She says, “Consulting taught me how to think. Building taught me how to act. At Grant Thornton, every recommendation came with research and frameworks. But when it’s your own brand, the deck becomes irrelevant you make the call, and you wake up with that decision every morning.” That shift, she says, requires a different relationship with uncertainty. “In consulting I waited for perfect information. Now I’ve learned that clarity often comes from doing, not just analysing. Most decisions are reversible anyway. The ones that aren’t, you feel in your gut.”
Her international perspective, shaped partly by her MBA from IE Business School in Madrid also informs how Rotoris positions itself globally. Rather than designing a watch brand specifically for India, Gupta believes the brand must speak to a broader mindset. “The mistake most brands make is treating the Indian consumer as one thing. It’s not. The person we’re building for isn’t defined by geography but by mindset first-generation wealth builders, people creating their own paths, people who value craft over flash. That consumer exists in Mumbai, in Dubai, in London. The aspiration is universal. We didn’t design Rotoris for India and hope it travels we designed it for the world and launched it from India,” notes Prerna. Her belief is that authenticity is what resonates most with today’s audience. “We’re not pretending to be someone else. We’re proudly building from India with transparent excellence. India is our launchpad it’s not our ceiling.”
Engineering the Heart of the Watch
If Aakash provides the entrepreneurial drive and Prerna shapes the creative narrative, the horological backbone of Rotoris lies with Harman Wadhwa. As the brand’s Founding Member and Horologist, Wadhwa oversees the technical development of every watch the company produces. Notably, he is among the few Indian watchmakers with formal training in Switzerland, placing him in the rare position of bridging traditional European watchmaking discipline with a new Indian ambition. His responsibilities range from movement selection and calibration to case engineering, sapphire crystal finishing, and final quality assurance.
For Harman, watchmaking is both science and craft. “Servicing a mechanical watch is not a superficial process. It requires complete disassembly, cleaning, lubrication, reassembly, and careful regulation. It’s both a technical procedure and a craft."
He is also keen to address common misconceptions among new collectors. “One of the biggest misunderstandings is that a watch only needs servicing once it stops working. By that point the movement has already experienced unnecessary wear. Mechanical watches rely on microscopic layers of lubrication, and over time those oils degrade. Environmental conditions also play a role, particularly in India. Humidity, dust, and temperature variation can affect a movement over time. Regular servicing and periodic inspection make a significant difference,” comments Harman. For him, the enduring appeal of mechanical watches lies in their longevity. He says, “A mechanical watch is one of the few objects we own today that is built with the intention of being passed on tomorrow,”
A New Kind of Watch Community
Beyond product and design, Rotoris is also being built as a community-led brand. Drawing from his experience in digital-first consumer businesses, Aakash believes younger audiences are drawn to something larger than the product itself. “Younger consumers don’t just buy products they buy participation in a narrative. They want to feel part of something evolving.”
Rotoris reflects that thinking through limited allocations, numbered pieces, and a transparent ownership registry. The brand also plans to build experiences around its community of collectors, creating spaces where owners interact with the brand and with each other. “Digital platforms allow us to combine storytelling, transparency, and community with a physical product. In many ways, Rotoris isn’t just a watch company it’s a brand built for a generation that sees ambition as a shared pursuit,” Aakash explains.
The Beginning of an Indian Watch Story
Rotoris arrives at a moment when global collectors are increasingly curious about independent watchmakers and new perspectives in horology. While the brand is still at the beginning of its journey, its founding team reflects a combination rarely seen in the Indian watch landscape: entrepreneurial scale, international creative strategy, and formal horological training.
More importantly, the founders are clear about the ambition. The goal is not merely to create another watch brand, but to build a platform that represents a new generation of Indian creators and entrepreneurs. If that vision holds true, Rotoris may well become part of a larger story. One in which India begins to carve out its own identity in the world of contemporary watchmaking.
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