The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Product decision · 2023–2025
Urban Company sold its own water purifiers through its service network — 26% of revenue
Using its trained technician base, Urban Company launched Native: purifiers it sells, installs and maintains end-to-end, bundling service into the product.
Urban Company
the move
India's ₹8,860 crore RO purifier market ran on a painful pattern: hardware was sold once, then servicing — up to 40% of the machine's price per year — was fragmented and unreliable. Urban Company, which had spent a decade training and deploying service professionals, saw the gap.
In 2023 it began piloting its own purifier brand, Native. Because Urban Company already owned the technicians, it could sell, install and maintain the devices end-to-end — a 'full-stack' model it had defined in 2016 — and claim its purifiers need no servicing for two years and no filter change for 12,000 litres.
The bundle worked: Native reached about ₹300 crore of annual revenue, roughly 26% of Urban Company's total, with FY25 hardware revenue jumping nearly fourfold to ₹116 crore. The company also services other brands' purifiers, using those relationships to seed upgrades to its own product.
why it works
- Own technicians gave Native a service advantage hardware-only brands couldn't match.
- Bundled service converts a one-off sale into recurring, predictable revenue.
- The existing app and trust lowered the cost of entering a new category.
- Service data on usage and faults feeds product design and retention.
what transfers
A service marketplace can become its own product company: when you already own the technicians and trust, an own-brand product with bundled service captures margin incumbents leave on the table.
what came after
Legacy brands pushed back — Kent accused Native of patent violation in 2024 — and Urban Company posted a ₹39.7 crore adjusted-EBITDA loss while scaling. It services 60 cities and says it has repaired over a million purifiers of all brands, positioning Native as the wedge into a product-service model ahead of its IPO.
references
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.