There is a particular kind of founder who doesn’t fall into their business — they arrive at it through decades of quiet obsession. Ninad Umargekar is one of them. A marketing professional with a career spanning consumer research, advertising, and brand strategy, he spent years building brands for other people before the thing he loved most in the world handed him one of his own – watches, or more specifically, what goes around them.
“There came a point when I realized I’ve been building brands for other people. I want to do my own brand,” he told Group Editor, IMAGES Group, Surabhi Khosla.
HEllO EDC, the brand Umargekar founded and is CEO of, is today India’s number one watch straps brand — a title that would have seemed improbable even to him not long ago. Started from a genuine disappointment (good watch straps were nearly impossible to source in India), the company began not with a business plan but with a personal collection. Umargekar would travel internationally, track down craftsmen in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and pockets of Europe, send them detailed specifications — stitch color, leather grade, lug width — and have straps made for his own watches. His collector friends were envious. That envy became a business.
The Origin: From Dharavi to D2C
The first batch of HEllO EDC straps came from a craftsman in Dharavi, Mumbai’s storied leather-working hub. Umargekar picked up some leather, had a small run made, and showed them to his collector friends. They wanted to buy. So he created an Instagram page — launched in May 2021 — and started taking orders via direct message. No website, no storefront, just photographs and passion.
For the first two years, he and his partners packed and shipped orders themselves through DTDC. The company was formally incorporated in January 2022. The D2C website came in January 2024. By that point, they had already built something more valuable than a sales channel: a community – although Umargekar is quick to clarify this saying, “We are not trying to build a community. We were actually born within a community.” His roots in the watch collector world — spanning more than a decade of attending meetups, participating in online forums, and forming friendships with fellow enthusiasts — meant HEllO EDC’s first customers were already invested, who followed, shared, and spread the word.
The Product: Modern Luxury Gear
Every HEllO EDC product is guided by a three-word philosophy. It shapes materials, colors, construction, and even the small technical decisions that most brands never consider.
- Modern: Playful colours and unexpected designs, nothing typical, nothing vintage for its own sake
- Luxury: Leather graded on par with Hermes, Louis Vuitton, etc. Edge colour, thread and finish are uncompromised.
- Gear: Function built into every detail – quick-release mechanisms, closer hole spacing and skin friendly materials.
That last point — hole spacing — is a good example of how Umargekar thinks. Industry standard is 7–8mm between holes, leaving wearers to punch custom holes when neither option fits perfectly. HEllO EDC’s holes are spaced at 5mm. It is a small change with an outsized effect on fit and comfort, and in four years of business, they have not received a single complaint about it.
“In a niche, your idea has to become the media. At the beginning, you don’t have enough money to buy media,” Umargekar explains. He says his brand does not manufacture in-house but designs everything from concept through prototype. They work with exportoriented leather goods manufacturers — the same factories that quietly make products for some of the world’s biggest luxury labels. India, it turns out, is a significant global leather manufacturing hub; HEllO EDC simply sources from the top end of it.
The Materials: Khadi, Tweed & Thai Silk
Leather is the foundation, but what sets HEllO EDC apart is what Umargekar reaches for beyond it. The brand has made watch straps in cotton and silk khadi, in tweed sourced from historic weaving mills in Amritsar – which Umargekar has branded ‘Five Rivers Tweed’, positioning it as India’s asnwer to Scotland’s Harris Tweed. Most recently, they dabbled in Thai Silk, which he brought back from a trip to Bangkok. Fabrics, he believes, will become an increasingly significant part of the brand’s identity.
There is also the horizon of material innovation: material derived from cactus, bamboo, apple waste, and pineapple fibres. While HEllO EDC hasn’t arrived there yet, but Umargekar speaks of it with the unhurried certainity of someone who already knows the direction he is heading.
The Market: The Untapped Opportunity Isn’t a Place — It’s an Attitude
The watch strap market in India is, in conventional retail terms, a replacement category. Visit any watch store and you will find straps kept in a drawer near the service counter, pulled out only when a customer’s original strap has cracked or snapped. Nobody is displaying them. Nobody is selling them as fashion.
HEllO EDC is trying to change that framing entirely — from replacement to expression. A quick-release mechanism means a strap can be swapped in seconds. The brand’s aim is to have watch owners thinking of straps the way they think of accessories: something to change with mood, occasion, outfit, and watch.
Pricing reflects the premium positioning. Most HEllO EDC straps sit at Rs 2,000 and above — a figure that surprises consumers accustomed to a market consisting of Rs 500 watch straps — but Umargekar is unapologetic. Compared to equivalent quality from European or Southeast Asian competitors, HEllO EDC’s pricing is roughly a third to a half the cost. The return rate of under 5% and repeat customer rate of around 30% in a low-frequency category suggest that once buyers understand the product, they stay.
The Community: Breakfast, Watches & the Buy-Sell-Hunt-Trade
HEllO EDC runs a tight WhatsApp group of around 75 collector insiders — part community, part focus group, all enthusiast. More publicly, the brand sponsors and hosts events like informal Sunday morning breakfasts where 15 to 20 watch collectors gather to show, trade, and talk about their watches in person. The brand funds the breakfast and asks for nothing in return. The goodwill is, by all accounts, its own reward.
Physical retail is expanding too, although more carefully. HEllO EDC currently has approximately 10 retail touch points across India, including multi-city watch retailer Just in Time. The Hello Play Studio in Mumbai — a roughly 350-square-foot space that functions as office, shoot studio, and walkin store simultaneously — represents the brand’s vision of what experiential retail could eventually look like at scale: a “House of Hello,” with a coffee bar, jazz in the background, and straps to try on.
What’s Next: Watchlife, Not Just Watch Straps
Umargekar’s ambitions extend well past straps. He describes the company’s future in terms of four pillars, which he calls the Watchlife platform:
- Equipment: Straps, watch storage, carry pouches — the objects a collector needs.
- Experiences: In-person events that bring the community together.
- Expertise: The accumulated knowledge about pairing, wearability, and watch culture that the brand has built and continues to share.
- Enthusiasts: The core engine that derives the persuit of the Watchlife.
He says international expansion is the near-term priority. The Middle East and Southeast Asia — markets with strong watch cultures — are first. The United States is on the radar, though global trade uncertainty has nudged the timeline. The company has already raised one angel round and is actively in conversations for a seed round.
And behind all of it is a singular, stated ambition: to become the world’s number one Watch Life brand. In a country without a single globally recognised consumer brand to its name — a fact that visibly pains him — Umargekar wants HEllO EDC to be the first.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that in one lifetime. But I believe we’re a great bunch of people here, and we’re all equally passionate. And great style sparks HEllOs. That’s still where it starts,” he concludes.
