India’s consumer‑tech landscape has long been defined by an utilitarian and pragmatic visual aesthetic. If you stepped into an Indian kitchen or an office a decade or so ago, you were greeted by a familiar taxonomy of beige, grey and black, and predictable slabs of glass, plastic, and metal. And even if an Indian brand attempted a stylish, it was frequently a derivative riff of whatever was trending in California or Shenzhen.
Consumer gadgets and home appliances were built to meet a price point, not a design ambition. The bestselling products borrowed cues from global brands, followed safe templates, and rarely attempted to express anything beyond utility.
Recently, things have changed.
A new generation of brands are challenging the long-held industry dogmas that Indian consumers care only about the spec sheet, that price-to-performance is the sole metric of survival, and that design is a cosmetic indulgence, and therefore an afterthought.
“What fascinated us was the role that technology was beginning to play in everyday life. Yet the products around them had largely remained transactional,” Pankaj Garg, co-founder of DailyObjects, explains the genesis of the design-driven lifestyle brand, which began in 2012. It’s a sentiment that captures the broader moment: Technology became central, but the ecosystem didn’t evolve.
The End of the Utilitarian Era
But now the Indian consumer demographic is changing, and with it, taste. The country’s tech market is now driven heavily by younger buyers, especially Gen Z, who treat their gadgets as a part of their personal style. They are design‑literate, aware of global trends, and increasingly unwilling to settle for products that don’t fit into their aesthetics.
Lifestyle tech brand Noise’s co‑founders Amit and Gaurav Khatri have seen this shift firsthand. “Gen Z now drives almost 50% of India’s $45 to $50 billion consumer tech market,” they say, adding, “They see it as a direct extension of their personal style.” This willingness to choose products for how they feel, not just how they perform, is what has opened the door for a new aesthetic.
Design that solves problems
The most interesting part of this shift is that Indian brands aren’t simply making products look better. They’re using design as a way to solve problems.
Gazal Kalra founded NUUK on the premise that global design templates cannot be parachuted into Indian households without contextual adaptation. Kalra’s team spends weeks inside real homes before sketching any designs for products, because she says the company likes to learn how people live with their appliances.
The company’s REN PRO vacuum cleaner, for example, has 34kPa suction power—far higher than typical cordless cleaners—because construction dust, particulate matter and cooking fumes in Indian homes require a different engineering approach. Plus, it comes with a bending rod that goes under sofas and beds, because Indian homes have layouts that international brands don’t always consider.
DailyObjects, meanwhile, focuses on removing or easing the friction points of everyday tech use—charging, organising, carrying. The company’s stellar wireless charging ecosystem called Node, is a case in point. DailyObjects spent two years designing Node, where the charging alignment happens effortlessly, and one system powers multiple devices, resulting in clutter-free workspaces. Garg considers good design to be “functionality expressed thoughtfully”.
A global aesthetic shaped by Indian realities
The new Indian tech aesthetic isn’t purely local. To Kalra, NUUK’s designs draw from global design traditions—Japanese minimalism, Scandinavian simplicity, European material sensibilities—but it doesn’t replicate them blindly. “Japanese design inspires us with its emphasis on simplicity, precision, and durability, while Scandinavian design stands for minimalism, functionality, and timelessness,” she says.
“India‑first design isn’t about adding Indian motifs,” Garg says, “It begins with understanding how Indians actually live.” The brand’s colour palettes are timeless and versatile, while adapting them for use in Indian homes, offices, cafés, airports, and co‑working spaces. This approach seems like a far cry from Indian brands using folk-inspired kitschy designs.
The rise of ‘Lifestyle-Tech’
To understand why this shift is happening now, one must look at how Indian homes are evolving. The modern urban elite Indian home, has undergone a spatial revolution where open kitchens now merge with living rooms, workspaces fold into bedrooms, and living rooms are where daily life happens. In this integrated living environment, a purely utilitarian gadget or appliance that is shorn of aesthetics is jarring.
But that doesn’t also mean that the utilitarian era is over, because price sensitivity is very real. But one could say that the design era has begun. And it’s being built not by one brand, but by a cohort that sees India not as a market to adapt to, but as a market to design for. The new Indian tech aesthetic—global, yet rooted—is still being shaped, but the direction is unmistakable.
Abhishek Baxi is a New Delhi-based tech writer.