By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
By 2002, Su-Kam had established itself in India’s inverter market. The first products — the black-chassis MOSFET inverters that had disrupted Kolkata’s transistor-based dominance — were selling. The distribution network was growing. Competitors were copying the single-battery design, which was, in its way, a form of recognition.
Kunwer was already thinking about the next problem.
The Complaint That Became a Product
It came from a customer complaint, the way many of Su-Kam’s best ideas did. Metal inverters were getting people hurt — not through electrical failure, but through the chassis itself. In India’s humid climate, in homes and offices where water spilled and monsoon damp crept into corners, a metal box carrying electrical charge was a genuine hazard. Customers were getting mild shocks. Some were getting worse.
The engineers said: change the warning label. Move the inverter to a higher shelf. Earthing issue.
Kunwer said: change the body.
The idea was to build an inverter in a plastic chassis — one that would not conduct current to someone who touched it, that would not rust, that could be placed anywhere in a home without requiring an electrician’s assessment of the installation environment. It seemed straightforward. It was not.
The Engineering Resistance
The R&D team’s first objection was the heat problem. Inverters generate significant heat during operation. Metal chassis dissipate heat. Plastic traps it. Put a standard inverter circuit inside a plastic box and you will, eventually, melt the box — or more precisely, warp it, crack it, and create ventilation problems that degrade the electronics inside.
The second objection was structural. Metal inverters were heavy and rigid. A plastic equivalent would need to be thick enough to protect the components, engineered to handle the weight of the internal battery connections, and designed with ventilation that would work passively.
Kunwer told the team to solve it rather than list the problems.
The solution came from an unexpected partnership. GE’s plastics division — then part of GE’s industrial materials business — had a material called PC ABS: a blend of polycarbonate and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene that was relatively new in the Indian market. It was stronger than standard plastic, and critically, it could withstand temperatures up to 120 degrees Celsius before deforming. With a temperature sensor added to the circuit — shutting the inverter down if internal heat exceeded safe levels — the problem was solvable.
The collaboration with GE Plastics took roughly a year. The design went through multiple iterations. Ventilation patterns were tested. The weight distribution was adjusted. The internal mounting was redesigned to fit the new chassis geometry.
The Name
When the product was ready, Kunwer named it “Chic.”
This was characteristic. He had a habit of naming products — not with model numbers or technical designations, but with words that carried associations. “Chic” was a word associated with style, with beauty, with something that belonged on display rather than hidden behind a piece of furniture. It was a statement about what the product was: not a functional appliance to be tolerated, but something you might actually want in your living room.
It launched in 2003.
The Response and the Regret
The market responded immediately. The product was visually distinctive, technically sound, and — for the first time in the inverter industry — aesthetically considered. Homes that had kept their inverters out of sight began putting them where guests could see them. The Chic became, for a period, something close to a status object.
India Today magazine, covering innovation in Indian manufacturing, gave Su-Kam an innovation award. The Chic was cited as the decade’s innovation in its category.
Most of the units sold in 2003 were still in service twenty years later.
And then the copying started.
A competitor produced what was, by any practical measure, an identical product — same plastic body, same overall form factor, same market positioning. It went into the market. Customers were confused. Some of the copied units had quality problems, which created reputational damage that touched Su-Kam even though the failing products weren’t Su-Kam’s.
Kunwer went to court. He lost.
The reason he lost was that Su-Kam had filed the design patent after launching the product. Under intellectual property law, public disclosure before patent filing undermines the patent claim. The timeline was simply wrong. The team had been so focused on getting the product to market that the legal infrastructure around the design had been handled as an afterthought.
It was the first direct IP battle Kunwer had fought. He lost it on a procedural point, not a technical one. The lesson — file first, launch second — was expensive and very clear.
What the Chic Established
The Chic inverter’s legacy is not primarily the product itself, successful as it was. It is the proof of concept it represented: that in the inverter industry, aesthetic design was a competitive variable, not a luxury. That customers would pay more for something that looked like it had been designed rather than assembled. That a product’s visual language communicated trustworthiness, care, and technological seriousness in ways that specifications sheets could not.
Every premium inverter that came after the Chic — from Su-Kam and from every competitor who copied the approach — inherited that logic, even when they didn’t acknowledge the source.
The plastic granules eventually became an economic problem. As raw material costs shifted and metal became cheaper, the margins on plastic-body inverters compressed. Su-Kam moved back toward metal chassis in later years. But the brand identity built during the Chic era — a company that thought about how its products looked, that named them rather than numbered them, that gave inverters the design attention previously reserved for electronics — that identity was the company’s most durable product.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev