By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
There is a particular kind of business achievement that is quietly more significant than winning a large contract or crossing a revenue milestone: naming a category. When your product’s name becomes the word people use for the entire segment — the way “Xerox” became a verb, or “Hoover” a noun — you have done something that advertising cannot replicate and competitors cannot easily undo.
In 2005, Kunwer Sachdev launched a product called the Home UPS. He named the category. It stuck. It stuck so firmly that within twelve months, every inverter company in India was using the same two words to describe their competing products.
The Problem with Inverters
Standard inverters of the early 2000s had a switchover delay. When grid power failed, the inverter sensed the outage and switched to battery power. The switch took time — typically a few hundred milliseconds, sometimes more. For lights and fans, this was invisible. For a desktop computer, it was catastrophic: the machine crashed, data was lost, files were corrupted. For a television, it produced a visible flicker and reset the channel.
As India’s middle class expanded its ownership of personal computers and as home entertainment systems became more common, this switchover delay was increasingly unacceptable. People were not buying inverters for lights anymore; they were buying them for computers, for televisions, for devices that could not tolerate an interruption.
An Uninterruptible Power Supply — a UPS — was designed precisely to solve this. Industrial UPS units had always offered seamless switchover, maintaining continuous power output while switching between grid and battery. But industrial UPS units were expensive, heavy, and engineered for server rooms and hospital equipment. Nobody had built one for an Indian home, at Indian home prices, with the battery capacity to run a household rather than a single workstation.
The Insight
Kunwer’s insight was simpler than the engineering challenge it described: the household needed what the data centre had always had, at a price the household could afford.
The Home UPS concept fused two product categories. It had the backup duration and multi-appliance capacity of a home inverter — able to run lights, a fan, a television, a refrigerator — with the seamless switchover of a UPS. The device would detect a grid outage and switch to battery power so quickly that a computer screen showed no disruption. The cursor would keep blinking. The video would keep playing. The user would know the power had gone not because their screen flickered but because the room went quiet without the hum of the air conditioning.
The engineering challenges were real. The switchover speed required capacitor-based energy buffering to bridge the microseconds between grid loss and battery engagement. The battery management had to work across both UPS-duty (short, frequent switching events) and inverter-duty (long sustained discharge during extended outages) use cases. The cost had to land somewhere a middle-class household would consider reasonable.
There was also a tax complication. Inverters and UPS units were taxed at different rates under India’s then-prevailing sales tax structure. A product that was technically both needed to be classified correctly, and the classification could affect the economics significantly. Working within this, Kunwer developed a design feature that allowed users to select between “computer mode” (UPS behaviour, lower switching time) and “standard mode” (inverter behaviour, optimised for larger loads). This toggle was not merely a feature; it was also a tax-positioning tool that gave the product flexibility in how it was classified and sold.
The Industry’s Reaction
When Su-Kam launched the Home UPS, competitors were dismissive. The product was more expensive than standard inverters. The technology was more complex. The benefit — seamless switchover — was not something most inverter customers had ever thought to ask for. The conventional wisdom in the industry was that customers bought on price and backup time, and the Home UPS competed on neither.
Within a year, every significant inverter company in India had launched a Home UPS.
The market had voted. Customers understood the benefit as soon as it was demonstrated to them. Dealers began asking for the product. The distribution network rewarded it. And Kunwer’s company had the twelve-month head start that comes with being first — a lead in customer relationships, in dealer familiarity, in the credibility that comes from being the company that introduced the category rather than the company that followed.
The competitors who had been dismissive were now using Su-Kam’s terminology to describe their own products. There was no alternative. “Home UPS” was the phrase; Su-Kam had defined it; and the phrase had become universal before anyone thought to protect it.
The LED Indicators
Around the same period, Kunwer was on a flight from Delhi to Mumbai when he looked up at the aircraft’s overhead display panel — the indicator lights showing seat belt signs and lavatory occupancy — and had an idea.
Inverter indicator lights of the time were primitive: a red light for fault, a green light for charging, a steady glow versus a blinking light for different states. The information available to the user was minimal. But the aircraft panel above him was showing status information clearly, cheaply, using a grid of simple LEDs arranged to represent different states visually.
He brought the idea back to the R&D team. They built a prototype: an LED display panel that showed battery level graphically, charging status visually, load level at a glance — all using inexpensive LEDs arranged in an informative layout rather than a single-colour indicator. The implementation was cost-effective, the manufacturing simple, the user benefit immediate.
He didn’t patent it.
Within months, the LED indicator panel had been copied across the industry. It became the standard. Every inverter sold in India for the next decade used a variation of the approach. Kunwer had done it twice now — launched something that became universal and then watched others take it without legal challenge. The Chic had taught him about design patents. The LED indicators extended the lesson.
He later described these episodes not with bitterness but with a kind of rueful pragmatism: the measure of a real innovation is that it spreads, that it improves the product for everyone including your competitors’ customers, and that if you were first you carry the reputational benefit regardless of whether you carry the legal protection.
The Home UPS remained in production for years, iterating through multiple generations. The term itself never changed.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev