There’s no shortage of accessory and small-appliance brands jostling for shelf space in India right now, so when a new name enters the ring, the first question is always the same: what’s actually different here?
I sat down with Mr Mohit Anand, the founder of WOZOYO, which is a newly launched global brand built on the back of a hugely successful Honeywell licensing business, to find out why they decided to build something of their own, what the brand stands for, and where they think the Indian consumer is headed.
A little background, WOZOYO comes out of a company called Secure Connections, which started off with having a brand license from Honeywell and was developing, designing, manufacturing, selling, and distributing products under the Honeywell brand. With a larger goal and a global vision, Mr Mohit Anand and his co-founder started working on WOZOYO to widen their horizons and be free of the limitations that come with a licensing business. Here’s everything I found out about the brand during my conversation with Mr Anand.
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Why build a new brand when the Honeywell license was already working?
Q: You’ve had phenomenal success building the Honeywell licensing business in India. So why start from scratch with a new global brand?
The founder was candid that the licensing model, for all its success, came with built-in ceilings. A geography-based license meant certain markets with bigger economic opportunities were simply off-limits. A product-category license meant that even if the company spotted a promising emerging-tech opportunity and had the in-house capability to deliver it well, it couldn’t act on it. And, perhaps most fundamentally, a licensed business is never truly your own, it isn’t your brand.
That realisation, roughly two years ago, kicked off an 18-month process of figuring out the opportunity, the competitive landscape, and what consumers in these categories actually wanted. The result is WOZOYO, a brand built around the company’s core strength as a product company: designing, developing, and manufacturing.
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Where does the name come from?
Q: WOZOYO is an unusual name. What’s the thinking behind it?
It’s an invented word, developed with a top UK creative agency and refined through consumer testing to check how it would resonate and what it needed to stand for. The brand’s four pillars, as the founder laid them out, are meant to be simple and repeatable: innovative, cool, chic, and reliable.
Even the logo carries intent, the three “O”s are stylised as an open, gaping mouth, meant to represent a consumer’s “wow” moment. It’s a small detail, but it’s clearly meant to do a lot of communicative work.
What problem is WOZOYO actually trying to solve?
Q: Tech brands love to talk about “solving problems.” What’s the specific frustration you’re targeting?
This is where the pitch got more interesting. The founder’s argument is that tech has become omnipresent in daily life, but that omnipresence has brought a quiet undercurrent of frustration — devices that don’t work seamlessly, complicated unboxing and setup experiences, chargers that overheat, cables that kill the very experience they’re meant to enable. He cited a personal example: needing an HDMI extender mid-presentation because a laptop simply didn’t have the port for it.
WOZOYO’s promise, as he put it, is to take that “tech chaos” and turn it into “tech calm” — products that just work, look good doing it, and don’t require a manual and a phone call to a friend to set up. It is the end-to-end quality that is the frustration that WOZOYO is targeting.
What does WOZOYO actually make?
Q: Walk me through the product strategy.
Two buckets. The first is wellness, which includes small domestic appliances centred on personal care and the air we breathe, starting with air purifiers, with humidifiers and dehumidifiers as likely next categories.
The second, more distinctive bucket is what he called a “four-screen strategy”. Here, we are building enhancement products around the four screens that dominate modern life: smartphone, TV, PC, and tablet. WOZOYO isn’t building the screens themselves; it’s building the docking stations, cables, extenders, and accessories that are meant to make the experience around those screens genuinely good, rather than the usual afterthought bundled cheaply into the box.
Q: Is there a hero product you’re most proud of?
He sidestepped this one deliberately, comparing it to asking a parent to name a favourite child. Fair enough.
Where’s the actual differentiation, in a commoditised category?
Q: This is a crowded, commoditised space. Where’s the real gap?
To this, Mr Anand was refreshingly honest: the gap isn’t in the category, there are dozens of players that will come and go in these spaces. He argues that the differentiation has to come in usability, experience, and aesthetics. Pointing to accessories like extenders and card readers as examples where most products are functional but rarely designed with any real intent, and positioned WOZOYO’s approach as being end-to-end, where not only will the product work well and offer good after sales support, it will also follow an aesthetics-first ideology without compromising on performance.
Who is WOZOYO actually for?
Q: Who’s the target customer?
In India, the initial focus is squarely on young, urban professionals across the top eight cities – upwardly mobile, single or married, and digitally native. Globally, Mr Anand expects that profile to widen.
Interestingly, the brand also has a mascot, “the wise one,” designed around the Japanese design philosophy of Ma, or minimalism. The studio behind it is based in Tokyo, and the character is built to be calm, quirky, and a little wise, popping up to offer a light, funny take on common tech frustrations (like a charger running hot) before disappearing again. It’s aimed squarely at a Gen Z and millennial audience that responds to personality-led branding rather than spec sheets.
How does WOZOYO plan to win in a market where perception matters as much as price?
Q: Brand perception drives a lot of purchase decisions in India. How do you plan to break through as a new player?
No illusions here — he was upfront that this will be an uphill battle in a cluttered market. The near-term strategy is sampling: get the product into people’s hands, let it do the talking, and let word-of-mouth (and creator-led content) take over from there. He was equally clear that this is a long-haul, multi-year commitment, not a campaign with a finish line — comparing it to the years it took Honeywell-branded products, under their licensing business, to become bestsellers on e-commerce and quick-commerce platforms in several categories.
The playbook, as he described it, is unglamorous but deliberate: daily discipline on social media, building out a creator ecosystem, widening e-commerce and quick-commerce distribution, and training the offline retail channel to actually be able to talk about the product.
What’s next?
Q: What can we expect from WOZOYO over the next six to twelve months?
The brand has launched in the US and India, with a phased rollout planned across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Southeast Asia over the coming months. In India, distribution already spans major e-commerce platforms and a growing offline footprint, with quick-commerce integrations still being built out. New product categories are in the pipeline, though details are being kept under wraps for now.
Our Take
WOZOYO, despite the rather odd name, comes with a very clear and targeted approach for the Indian market. It is something that has been tried before, but given the vast product lineup, finding a niche may take some time or convincing customers that all products in such a wide range are equally good may become tricky in the long run.
How good the products are, I will only be able to tell after testing, but given the confidence that the founders showed with both the products and the market they are looking to capture, WOZOYO sounds very promising.
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