Power On Wheels — the moving demonstration van that sold inverters before the customer reached home

A showroom on wheels beats a brochure because doubt disappears when the fan keeps spinning during a real outage.

Su-Kam’s early advantage was demonstration. I sold the first five hundred inverters myself with the case open — telecallers on Yellow Pages, cable-TV dealers, friends who let us park units in their homes to watch real load behaviour. That does not scale city by city unless you mechanise the proof.

The van had a name: Power On Wheels

We built a moving demonstration unit — a van outfitted to show what a Su-Kam inverter could run, how protections behaved, and why sine-wave output mattered for refrigerators and fans. Not a poster on wheels. A working system:

• Live load — fans, lights, maybe a small fridge depending on the audience
• Switchover visible — grid off, inverter on, no drama
• Technician who could answer the electrician’s questions without hiding behind “sales talk”

The name was deliberate. Power On Wheels told every village, housing colony, and dealer meet exactly what they were getting: power backup you could inspect, not promise.

Marketing as engineering theatre

Competitors ran print ads with stock photography of happy families. We pulled up, opened the back, and let the fan keep spinning while someone asked about battery size. That is category creation in a market that still thought inverters were grey boxes assembled in back lanes.

Power On Wheels sat in the same toolkit as Sales Ka Bazigar (finding people who could run the demo) and dhaba boards (keeping the name visible between visits). Later, when we launched YouTube and Facebook, the van became content fodder too — real installations, real faces, real loads. The digital channels amplified what the van had already taught us: show, don’t claim.

— Kunwer Sachdev