When Jaipur Watch Company designer and founder Gaurav Mehta was young, he recalls opening up his watches out of curiosity to see how they functioned. And one fine day, the 35-year-old says, he placed a coin inside one, reassembled it and started wearing it. This was perhaps the earliest inspiration behind The One Rupee Watch that he later created for Jaipur Watch Company using a 1947 Re 1 coin. Interestingly, that coin was the last one created under the British rule. Mehta says they source coins either from auction houses or numismatic societies. “The coins that we use are uncirculated ones,” he says.
Clearly, we have long moved past the time when the watch’s only function was to tell the time. Today, it reflects the wearer’s style and personality. Also, if made with imagination and creativity, it can tell a story. Watch lovers today, in fact, are moving beyond the Omegas and the Rolexes, choosing instead to spend their money on customised timepieces sporting monograms, emblems, flags, coins, etc. And it’s this niche clientele that the Jaipur Watch Company is targeting with its unique offerings. Take, for instance, its Peacock Watch, which sports a peacock feather inside a slim 18-carat gold body. It comes with an exclusive patent leather strap and a diamond encrusted on the rim in the 6 o’clock position. The price range of the company’s pret watches is Rs 16,000-`55,000. For a bespoke piece, it could go upto `2.5 lakh, depending on the amount of customisation a client requires, the design, complexity, precious or semi-precious stones used, etc.
Jaipur Watch Company was started by Jaipur-based Mehta in 2013 and is his third business venture. His first was an insurance broking firm, which he started in 2005 after coming back from London, where he was working as an insurance broker. Then in 2009, he started running family entertainment centres in Jaipur, Ludhiana and Kathmandu. For the initial funding of Jaipur Watch Company, Mehta had to sell his second business, his car and also take loans from friends.
The perseverance, however, seems to have paid off. Today, Jaipur Watch Company, which counts the royal family of Jodhpur among its clients, makes 800-900 watches a year, retailing them through Tijori, the in-house boutique at The Oberoi hotel, New Delhi—there are also plans of opening flagship stores in Jaipur and Delhi soon. In terms of volume, the custom-made watches are 20% of the business, contributing almost 70% of their total sales. The actual watch technology is imported from Japan and Switzerland. Besides Jodhpur’s royal family, which recently got custom-made watches made for its polo team, the company has also created watches for the government of Uttarakhand. The majority of the clientele, however, comprise NRIs, especially from Dubai.
Watchmaking, though, is a precise art and not without challenges. The most difficult assignment so far for Mehta (who takes around six months to make a watch) was creating a timepiece using a particular $1 silver coin. The client wished to see both sides of the coin, as well as the machinery of the watch in the final product. To achieve that, Mehta sliced the coin in two parts, using one part as the top and the other as the bottom. He also added a lid, so that the client could see the machinery easily. “Developing this whole thing was a feat of engineering,” says Mehta.
