A customer told me his young daughter had been shocked while wiping the metal body of an inverter on a rainy day. I could not rewire every Indian home. So I decided to rewire the product.

“I didn’t want to build an appliance people merely tolerated. I wanted to build one a family would be proud to keep in their home.”

A businessman with a difference

01The complaint that became a product

By 2002, Su-Kam’s black-chassis MOSFET inverters were selling. Distributors were growing. Competitors were copying our single-battery design. But a quieter problem was already forming in Indian homes.

Metal inverters were getting people hurt — not always through circuit failure, but through the chassis itself. In monsoon damp and humid rooms, a metal box carrying charge was a genuine hazard. Customers were getting mild shocks. Some were getting worse.

My engineers said: change the warning label. Move the inverter to a higher shelf. Earthing issue.

I said: change the body.

I wanted a plastic chassis that would not conduct current to a child’s hand, would not rust, and could sit anywhere in a home without an electrician first declaring the room “safe enough.” It sounded simple. It was not.

02“Plastic can’t take the heat”

My own R&D fought me. Inverters generate serious heat. Metal dissipates it. Plastic traps it. Put a normal circuit in a plastic box and you will warp the shell, crack the vents, and cook the electronics.

The second objection was structural. Metal boxes were rigid and heavy. A plastic body had to be thick enough to protect the components, strong enough for battery connections, and ventilated so heat could escape without a fan drama.

I told the team to solve it — not list why it was impossible.

The answer came through a partnership with GE Plastics. They had a material relatively new to India then: PC-ABS — a polycarbonate and ABS blend that could withstand roughly 120°C before deforming. We redesigned the circuit, added a temperature sensor that shut the inverter down if internal heat crossed the safe line, and spent about a year iterating ventilation, weight distribution, and mounting geometry.

When it was ready, I named it Chic.

I never liked model numbers for home products. “Chic” meant style — something you could be proud to display, not hide behind a sofa. I did not want an appliance people merely tolerated. I wanted one a family would keep in the heart of the home.

03Meet the CHIC — and the IP lesson

In 2003, the Chic hit the market like a bombshell. For the first time, an Indian inverter looked designed. Homes that had kept backup power under staircases began bringing it into living rooms. Some families used that unit for more than twenty years.

The bombshell of 2003

Then the copying started. A competitor made what looked like the same plastic product. Some of those inferior copies burned in the field and stained the whole idea of plastic inverters. We went to court. We lost — because we had filed the design patent after launching, not before. Public disclosure had already weakened the claim.

That procedural defeat was expensive and very clear: file first, launch second. It later drove me to build a patent machine — averaging filings month after month — so we would never again gift our design language to the market unprotected.

04The Trendy — features on a screen

I always gave models names, and a few became brands of their own. The Trendy was another first: the first inverter in the Indian market with a digital display — battery status, load percentage, every key feature on screen. Nobody had done it before. Chic, Trendy, Fairy Queen — each name told a story. Each product had a personality.

Another industry first

05The Fairy Queen — from 1855 steam legend to drawing-room joy

After Chic, I dreamed bigger. An inverter sitting in a bedroom or drawing room is not only utility — it is furniture. It has to earn its place.

India’s historic 1855 Fairy Queen steam locomotive — one of the world’s oldest operating steam engines, a symbol of mechanical elegance — became the design inspiration. I drew the brief myself: a plastic inverter shaped like a locomotive.

But heritage was only the starting point. The real ambition was emotional: “We wanted a drawing-room showpiece that delighted children, not an industrial box shoved into a dark corner.” Backup power should live where the family lives — something kids would love and parents would display proudly.

R&D delivered. The electronics were solid. The industrial design was striking. We validated and tested for months. Internally, we were convinced we had something the market had never seen.

Exhibit · The Su-Kam Fairy Queen

Then the launch collapsed at the gate. What nobody caught — through all the product testing — was the packaging. The locomotive shape that made Fairy Queen so distinctive also made it geometrically hard to pack safely for India’s rough transport. Shipments reached dealers damaged. Not a few — enough to trigger returns, angry calls, and a rapid loss of trust in a product that had never even had a fair chance to perform.

The cruelty was this: the inverter itself worked. It looked extraordinary. None of that mattered once broken units started arriving at showrooms. In this business, a dealer’s reputation rides on what they recommend. A bad launch sticks.

I told my team the blunt truth: we had done everything right with the product, and almost nothing right with the box. From that year on, packaging stopped being an afterthought. Drop tests, compression tests, corner impact — what went inside the carton and what the carton could survive became part of the product specification itself.

Fairy Queen never became the brand Chic became. But it shaped every product decision after it. The instinct never left me: if a product sits in someone’s home, it must earn the right to be there — and the journey from factory to drawing room is part of the product.