Nasscom profiles Bang Design

Arun Katiyar , Business Standard Full text available here

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which rarely get to look beyond quarterly survival and profits, are now beginning to seek the services of blue-blooded industrial design companies to raise the bar on their products and challenge bigger brands.

Consider this. With big businesses putting everything on hold, including new product design, Vinay Rao, founder of Bangalore-based Bang Design has now started working with SMEs. “We have a new engagement model for SMEs — we don’t just reduce our fees, we partner them and seek royalty in the product or equity in the company. Until now, SMEs never thought about design as a tool for business growth,” he says.

Bang Design — which has been working with global technology majors like Dell and Microsoft — has worked with companies like D-Link to create major innovations like the snagless cable. D-Link was the first company in the world to a launch the snagless Ethernet connector cable that is now an industry standard.

Bang Design has also worked on the design for Tata Indicom’s Access Business Unit to create a multifunctional terminal delivering features beyond the capability of a mere phone booth from a public domain user perspective. “Although the design could have been better in terms of aesthetics, it was perfect from the engineering point of view and rugged enough for larger user volumes,” says Kaustuv Chatterjee who was heading marketing for the product but left Tata in 2007. The Tata Indicom Parsec went on to win a NID Design award in 2007.

With his background, Rao has now begun to put all his experience to work for SMEs who he says “are coming out to play.” Two such examples are Captain Public — a stealth-mode company in the retail space — and Sloka, a manufacturer of Wi-Max equipment for Enterprise data access in urban environments, Voice over IP, cellular backhaul and residential Internet. Sloka, which won a NASSCOM Innovations Award in 2008, recently rolled out its first devices in France. They were designed by Bang.

“We needed an all-weather base station that could cool without a cooling device. We couldn’t find such an enclosure anywhere in the world. I had heard that Bang had done an enclosure for wireless equipment to be used in boats, so we got Bang to design our stuff. It passed the DRDO lab test and other thermal and moisture tests and we are very happy with the design,” says Sloka founder Sujai Karampuri.

The author is an independent, Bangalore-based content and communications consultant