The Tech Apparel
Broadcast Wear started by Ayyappa Nagubandi, Mahalakshmi Nagubandi, and Saumil Shah in Hyderabad are causing disruption with their innovative technology in the smart apparel world. Rather than wearing a different tee shirt for the sake of your different moods, keeping a fitness tracker to monitor your activities and a sleep tracker, you can ditch all of this and wear just a smart tee shirt that would do all this for you.
This Hyderabad based startup aims at revolutionizing the way wearable tech industry is moving with their innovation of putting all technologies in clothes.
“Why do people need to wear an extra object when they can wear a T-shirt which looks like any other T-shirt, costs the same, but works like a tech accessory?” is the question which inspired the founding trio to start Broadcast Wear.
SYGNAL
Established in February 2016, the first range of products saw touch-enabled T-shirts, from there on, they have come a long way and developed many other products with a focus on transforming the clothes into tech accessories. Under the brand name SYGNAL, the company says its technology allows an apparel to be aware of its surroundings and interact, interpret and engage the environment around you.
Features
One of their T-Shirt allows the person to change the words or graphics in the front of the t-short whenever one feels like.
A feature like having an equalizer on the t-shirt, which senses the music playing in the background and displays the music waves on the front of the t-shirt. It’s ideal for those who wanna rock in a pub or dance club and catch the music waves in the same energy.
“The phone listens to the music and music waves are displayed on the LED panel,” explains Nagubandi.
The t-shirts can be used like any other regular t-shirt and require no special care. All these T-shirts can be washed multiple times, folded, or used in any way regular apparel can. The company has taken enough care to make it feel like a regular apparel.
Availability & Price
Currently, the products are available on their own site and Amazon too. The price range for the products is from Rs 999 to Rs 3,500. As of now, the US is serving to be their biggest market, followed by India.
New Products
The company has recently launched a new Jersey and is trying to capture the evolving market of fitness freaks and more especially cyclists.
“Usually, cyclists prefer either early mornings or evenings to do their exercise. The natural light is very low at both of the time periods which increase the possibility of someone coming from behind and hitting them. This cyclist’s jersey has LED sensors which light up near the back of the neck and when the wearer raises her or his right hand, the light behind the right gets switched, and vice-versa,”
explains Nagubandi.
“We use Surface Mounted Device LEDs (SMD-LED) in the t-shirt with flexible Printed Circuit Board (PCB). The front panel is connected to the microprocessor and the Bluetooth chip using conductive thread,” Nagubandi added.
Way Ahead
“We are working on a lot of ideas including the bed sheet which can track a person’s sleeping pattern the same way a sleep-tracker does. We, anyway, sleep on a bed sheet then why not buy a sensor-stimulated bed sheet instead of a sleep-tracker?” asks Nagubandi.
The company launches new products almost every month and aims at increasing the product range to 150 by next year. The plan is to keep innovating with the sole aim of eliminating superfluous gadgets from your body and let your clothes perform those very functions.
The company has been met with success right from their inception and have been growing steadily thereon. One of the factors that keep the audience interested is their range of products, that keeps increasing thus offering more variety to them.
“We have consistently clocked 300% growth year-on-year since we launched. When the orders started surging, we had to brace ourselves for things we had never done before and our learning curve was steep. Our expertise was in technology services and taking on a new market head-on was quite a challenge. We invested in training our staff of modern technologies and the nitty-gritty of the apparel industry. Most of our team has spent some sleepless nights,” says Nagubandi.
“We want to increase our sales and then, approach the investors. Very few in India are in this line of business and even in western countries, very few of such companies have made money. We want to approach investors not just with an impressive technology but also with the proof that people are buying this tech,” says Nagubandi.
