Up close with the founder of SMATE
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Up close with the founder of SMATE

Sunny Bhasin is the founder of SMATE – an Australian consumer electronics company that designs and manufactures high quality affordable consumer electronics, TVS, sound bars and headphones. With two engineering degrees and a fascination in technology, Sunny is creating products as a means to enable better living for everyone.

Hi Sunny thanks for chatting. To start can you tell us a bit about SMATE?

Basically it’s a new business. We’ve been planning it for the past year and a half to two years, looking at the current marketplace and accessing the requirements of the customers and the gaps in the marketplace. What we saw was there was no leading Australian brands in the consumer electronic space. There are a few, but they are not as popular or as big as most of the other well-known brands. We are now at a stage where we’ve launched a few of our products, with heaps more in the pipeline that will come through – we have headphones, the sound bars and televisions. We’re all about delivering a quality product at a price point that is quite competitive, and the reason we can do it is because so far we are an online based business, we have less overheads.

Can you tell us a bit about the headphones specifically?

In terms of the headphones specifically we’ve got three series; we’ve got the light series called the roaming series, then we have the all-series, which is a noise cancelling one and we have the gaming series as well. Most of our headphones are wireless, they come with the latest standard in terms of Bluetooth and the noise cancelling headphones also come with an NFC and delivers roughly 90% noise cancelling at decibels about 103 – it’s as good as some of the other best quality brands out there.

How long have these headphones actually been on the market for?

Roaming series have been on the market for roughly three or four months, and the noise cancelling and the gaming headphones have just come out this month. We had a few challenges along the way in terms of specs, design, the build and meeting all the safety standards, so it took us a while to actually get it all sorted before we could launch it. The idea was to launch it along with the roaming series but we just couldn’t do it. It’s a crowded marketplace, you can just go online and type in headphones are there are thousands and thousands of headphones.

On that note, what is your point of difference with your direct competitors?

We’ve got heaps of competitors out there, like it or not. In terms of quality from everything from the design to the build, to the specs to compliance, we’re making sure all the things are ticked. In terms of support, we’ve got fantastic support so it’s not as if you buy it once and if you’re not happy that’s it, we actually support our customers right to the end. In terms of the price point, we are keeping it quite competitive, so because it’s an online model we are able to do that, and every now and then we are running promotions to increase that competitiveness to allow general customers to procure these items at a reasonable price. We’re also doing a lot of community based work, so people with limited cash-flow, we actually assist them through community support so typically segments like pensioners and students, we actually offer them another 10% on top of any promotion we are running to make it more affordable for them.

And what’s been the most popular product/style so far?

So far, we’ve had a lot of sales and promising feedback on our roaming series only because we launched it earlier. However our noise cancelling headphones have been getting great reviews, so that is looking quite promising and that’s similar to the gaming headphones. I believe the noise cancelling is definitely the best we’ve got so far, even in terms of pricing because we have dedicated a lot of time and effort into designing and manufacturing the product.

Check out their range of products online at SMATE.com.au.

Image sourced via SMATE socials