The Rotoris House at Mr Button in New Delhi doesn’t behave like a watch retailer. No sales-counter choreography, no velvet tray slid across a barrier, no soft scrutiny disguised as small talk. It’s staged like a private salon — low light, close conversation, and a pace set by hospitality rather than transaction. Drinks and small plates move with quiet confidence. Then a detail that gives the room its tone: A cocktail menu, where each drink borrows a name from Rotoris’ five collections — Astonia, Arvion, Monarch, Auriqua, Manifesta — as if the watches have already been assigned personalities.
At the centre, glass cases hold the range. Sanchit Arora, Rotoris’ chief growth officer, stays close — near enough to point, pause, and let a detail land. The rule comes early: “You cannot buy the watch from here… you have to buy it online.” Rotoris frames this edition as a private-residence experience — invite-only, appointment-led — rather than conventional retail.
In watches, removing the counter isn’t styling; it’s strategy. The counter is retail’s great symbol of authority — distance, transaction, control. Take it away, and the watch has to stand on its own. The conversation stops orbiting around purchase and starts orbiting around judgement.
The most revealing object here isn’t inside the case.
It’s the loupe.
Arora’s claim is simple: They don’t just hand you a loupe; they direct your attention. The teaching isn’t vague. They’ll walk you through what’s happening inside a mechanical watch — how energy moves through the gear train, what an escapement does in practice, and why a complication reads as engineering rather than ornament.
He describes eight to nine appointments a day — less velvet rope than quality control — a way to protect attention and keep the room from becoming theatre. There’s an internal 15-day training program, he adds, before staff get to represent the brand in front of customers. Arora says he did it, too.
This is the tell. Asked what luxury myth she wants to unteach in India, Prerna Gupta, Rotoris co-founder and chief creative officer, puts it cleanly: “That premium requires permission.”
A room can slow your pulse. A watch has to do the harder work: Hold up when the hospitality fades.
In hand, the Rotoris pieces present as deliberately composed — design-forward, controlled, aimed at the buyer who wants modern Indian luxury without the usual inheritance story. The strongest cue is coherence: The dials read as intentional, and the collections feel like a system rather than a scatter of references.
But this is also where a young brand earns — or loses — authority: Alignment at the cardinal points, the precision of print and indices, the cleanliness of transitions between finishing surfaces, and how convincingly the case architecture wears at different angles, not just head-on under flattering light. Rotoris understands that literacy. The loupe becomes a quiet dare: Invite people to look closely, and you’re promising there’s nothing to hide.
That wager — look closer — is the real test. These watches don’t have a counter to protect them. They have craft to defend them. And that’s the best point: The theatre reads premium even when the numbers don’t. Pricing sits broadly in the ₹25,000–₹50,000 band — accessible-luxury territory, dressed in boutique theatre.
Across the range, case sizes run from 39.5mm (Arvion) to 42mm (Astonia; Auriqua). Arvion uses Seiko TMI VJ34 quartz, and Astonia runs Seiko TMI VK63 meca-quartz, while Monarch, Auriqua, and Manifesta are positioned as automatics.
A beautiful room is easy. A fair system is harder — and “fair” in luxury is always a choice of design.
Arora describes a timed 24–48 hour purchase window, framed as rules-based allocation. Rotoris, he says, aims for consistency: The same window, the same pathway, minimal discretion. He puts pressure on the numbers: “A waitlist for about 12,000… waiting to buy 600–700 pieces,” and says the wait has shortened to roughly a month. Dispatch, he says, takes “two to three weeks,” with serial numbering and a fixed 72-hour testing phase. When people miss their window, he says, Rotoris chooses not to punish hesitation — reopening access rather than treating delay as a moral failure. Strict about timing, not status.
Aakash Anand, Rotoris co-founder and CEO, frames the shift in a single line: “Five years ago, India was consuming luxury. Today, India is ready to create it.”
Asked what Rotoris’ moat is — what a new brand can’t copy quickly — Anand takes it beyond parts. “Design can be imitated, and components can be sourced,” he says, “What cannot be replicated quickly is philosophy, discipline and ecosystem.” In his framing, the durable part is the architecture around ownership and after-sales trust — built slowly, defended consistently.
If The Rotoris House is velvet, co-founder Anant Narula supplies the steel.
Referring to customers, Narula says, “The one thing that they will never see is how much we spend on rejecting stuff rather than getting it.” He offers a detail that makes the idea tangible: A tiny misalignment at 12 o’clock fixed by “a 3-degree turn” — a correction so small most buyers would never notice, yet costly enough that they “spent a month doing that.”
Kunal Kapania, co-founder, gives the cadence behind that refusal: No monthly “drops,” no churn disguised as excitement. Change any dial or component, he says, and “there is a one-month delay straight away.”
There’s one name that keeps returning to the room: Manifesta. “That was the first watch that got sold out,” Kapania says. Arora is still living inside the demand: “Four to five calls a day,” he says, with one request repeating itself — “Mother of pearl… at any cost.” Then comes a detail of taste: Arvion “naturally” slips under the cuff; Astonia can too. Manifesta is different — formal, Arora says: “it has to be out.” A watch you don’t hide; a watch you declare.
Rotoris doesn’t stop at “you can’t buy it here.” It builds a second intimacy: Remote, structured, paid-for. Arora describes a virtual consultation — ₹2,500 for 30 minutes, redeemable — where he puts watches on camera, shares real-time photos, goes through the nitty-gritty, and answers questions the way a boutique rarely has time for. The brand claims that people who take the consultation go on to buy.
Gupta draws a hard line on distribution: “We chose to stay entirely direct-to-consumer. No marketplaces. No multi-brand retail.” “The moment a Rotoris timepiece sits between a discount tag and a ‘similar products’ carousel, something breaks,” she says.
Rotoris extends the “House” logic into ownership. Arora describes the unboxing like a ritual: A Napa leather case, a founders’ note, a warranty card, a certificate of authenticity, and what he calls a Rotoris passport, paired with a service booklet designed to log the watch’s life over time.
And then the evening turns technical.
Harman Wadhwa, founding member and described by the brand as India’s first Swiss-qualified watchmaker, speaks less like a storyteller and more like a technician guarding standards — repairs, fabrication, and tolerances measured down to micrometres.
His QC language is direct: “Anything… above plus or minus 15 seconds we are rejecting.” Water testing, dust checks, power-reserve checks — done “quite stringently.” A rigorous 72-hour testing phase. Rotoris closes the loop with a lifetime movement promise — packaged, in its own language, as a “Lifetime Guarantee”.
The Rotoris House at Mr Button is intentionally ephemeral — Arora describes it as a limited run of roughly a month — and he talks about taking the format to other cities for short windows, keeping it small, controlled, personal.
“This is a mini version of the store that we are coming up very soon… in Gurgaon,” Kapania says. Rotoris also lists the upcoming appointment-only Rotoris House in Gurugram.
The watches are handsome. The room is perfectly judged. Rotoris’ real move is structural: Take away the counter, replace it with time, and let the watch earn belief the hard way — under a loupe, in conversation, and on its own terms.