Phones are ringing, handcarts are wheeling about stacked sky-high with cardboard boxes and tech-hungry customers are lurking in every corner of this lively beehive wedged deep in the city's computer district in Bur Dubai.
Welcome to the Al Ain Centre where energetic young salesmen are engaged in bustling commerce inside tiny computer shops overflowing with a never-ending stream of electronic goods shipped into Dubai from the Far East and beyond.
While a quick sweep of the Mankhool Street computer mall may give the impression that stores are simply hawking the same imported wares, one store quickly stands apart from its competitors Merlin sells its own electronic goods conceived, funded and branded in Dubai, a relative rarity in the UAE which relies heavily on imports from abroad.
As the name suggests, Merlin's two Dubai-born founders are conjuring up their own electronic wizardry in a 24/7, electronic business world that demands nothing less than innovation for survival.
In more than a decade since founding their own company in Dubai, brothers Sharad Bachani, 30, and Rohit Bachani, 28, have performed magic as cutting-edge pioneers with a knack for identifying niche product needs, developing them on paper, then partnering with Asian original equipment manufacturers to come up with their own Merlin brand of goods.
Skinny bottom line
"We are always looking for things people need but aren't made yet," said Sharad, sitting comfortably inside Merlin's small store that suggests owners here maintain a skinny bottom line by keeping overheads to a minimum.
Long after electronic giants have wowed the world with their newfound iPods, 3D televisions and smartphones, chances are the Bachani brothers were already quietly there well before the big boys, bought the T-shirt and have since moved on to greener pastures.
Since being incorporated in 1997, Merlin has released more than a dozen of its own electronic products items that have flown off the shelves of big-name electronics stores such as Plug-Ins and Jacky's Electronics in Dubai.
Their latest offering is sure to cast a spell on tech-savvy gadget lovers still crooning over Avatar's cinematic breakthrough as Merlin rolls out its new personal Pocket Theatre 3D handheld device.
So what's the big deal in a market saturated with portable movie viewers?
Merlin's Pocket Theatre 3D comes sans special spectacles. Customers who opt to buy the Bachani's latest e-wonder aren't forced to wear 3-D glasses to peer deep into the still and moving images displayed on the seven-inch monitor.
When Gulf News caught up with the enterprising Merlin lads, they were happy to assert that as far as they've been able to determine through product research, their new portable 3-D viewer is a first anywhere on the planet not to depend on special glasses.
And, it was conceived in Dubai where the brothers now have a small 1,000 square-foot assembly centre for final-stage assembly of items comprised of Merlin-commissioned components mostly from Asia.
Humble beginnings
Growing up on Rigga Street in Deira with their father Hiro Bachani, an Indian expatriate with a doctorate in marketing, certainly had its advantages for two young boys with dreams of someday making it big.
Exposed to "getting your message out" at an early age, marketing is certainly not a new concept for the Bachani brothers.
And Merlin's genesis, the brothers told Gulf News in an interview, goes back to the day when dad walked through the family home's front door with a Commodore 64, a simple computer that set older brother Sharad's feet firmly on the path he has taken today as Merlin's product development manager.
Rohit serves the company as sales and marketing head.
Sharad said at the age of 10, he was completely mesmerised by the home computer that took 45 minutes to upload a computer game through a serial port via a cassette player and broadcast on the family television.
He soon upgraded to what was called the Amiga 500, a computer already in high demand by a small community in Dubai that likened its graphic-user interface based upon an operating system known as Workbench Sharad quickly boned up on the computer system.
"I started helping Amiga owners with their problems and before I knew it, at age 14 I did my first import into Dubai. I imported a new computer for this guy who needed an additional graphics card to do video editing," he said.
His fateful first big break came when his high school called Delmon Institute at the time needed a batch of new computers. Windows 95 had just entered the market and Sharad convinced his teachers that he could tee up a deal to import the components of 30 computers and he could assemble each one at a lower cost.
Back on Rigga Street, the Bachani brothers went to work burning the midnight oil.
"I put them together in my bedroom, it was all fun at the time, it wasn't for the money at all," Sharad said.
Brother Rohit likened himself to "Igor the laboratory assistant and little brother."
Their first and foray into the world of computer assembly and sales was a success.
Akin to Greek scholar Archimedes stepping into the bath, Sharad was blessed with his first Eureka moment.
"That, probably more than any other moment, told me that this was something that I could do for a living," Sharad said. "It was also at the time that the PC Pentium was becoming popular and the internet was just picking up in 1996. I remember it cost something like Dh18 an hour to go online with etisalat."
After his first year of studying computer sciences in Dubai, Sharad decided to enter the computer industry directly and with the help of his father registered his first business with the Dubai Economic Department under the name of Soft Magic Systems LLC or SSS for short.
"Back then rents weren't very high so we rented a small shop in Bur Dubai," Sharad said, "and it was great for two years. Rohit just finished his [Ordinary] levels and joined me. Our first product was the SSS Electronics desktop, a PC Pentium."
To lower the cost of importing the eight or nine components needed to assemble each PC at their Refaa shop, the brothers ordered in bulk, 200 or so of each item, to command a better wholesale import price.
"What we didn't need for assembly, we sold individually and that helped keep our costs lower," said Rohit.
"That was big cost advantage for us at the time."
The first SSS Electronics computers sold for around Dh4,500.
The turning point
The year 1999 marked an important milestone on the learning curve for the young business owners when they devised a simple but very effective idea to outsmart competitors — a new DVD player was installed in the SSS Electronics desktops at a time when computers were outfitted with CD drives only.
"We offered something that not available at all in the market and it was very successful. We saw a 150 per cent jump in business," said Rohit. "Sales went up and margins went up."
Sharad said it was a turning point for the company because he realised that the market didn't just want computer goods; consumers were also hungry for electronic items that entertained.
"We wanted to bring customers a new line of innovative electronics," said Sharad, who moved digs into the new Al Ain Centre and by 2002 rebranded under the name Merlin, the magical wizard and subject of a book he was buried in at the time.
Bringing magic through electronics is a theme that has worked well with the product line of the brothers' budding empire.
The first product out of the gate under the Merlin name was a game-changer and an original, Sharad said an MP3 player among a long list of other players already in the market, but with a twist; a built-in wireless FM transmitter to broadcast saved digital music files directly to radio.
He approached manufacturers in Korea, provided a security payment up front and Merlin soon produced its first product under its own name.
Runaway success
"We were the first to come out with an FM transmitter built in," he said, "anywhere in the world. This is where Merlin really took off. Retailers were very excited about our product and it was soon selling in Radio Shack, Plug-Ins, Jumbo Electronics. They gave us access to their stores and we sold 5,000 units."
Each 128MB unit sold for Dh685.
In 2003, the MP3 craze intensified and the brothers answered by creating their very own 20GB Merlin Encore handheld music player and sold thousands more of the units for Dh1,250.
"This was a year before Apple released its first iPod," Sharad said, noting that in 2004 much ado was made about the Apple product's amazing capability to store 20GB on such a small device. In the months following, many iPod fakes started appearing on the market but the Bachani brothers were already looking ahead to their next innovative product.
Being small and well connected to its growing clientele list made it easier for the brothers to gauge what consumers wanted. In 2004, with Apple's iPod black-and-white screen dominating the market, Merlin came up with its next big seller, the YouGo handheld MP4 player which could hold up to 20GB of movies and play them on a small full-colour screen, an option that other handheld producers didn't come up with for what seemed like eons afterward, said the brothers.
The YouGo was equipped with an unusual feature at the time for a handheld digital device, the ability to record analog moving imagery directly onto the device.
"We sold about 3,000 units, which was great for us because this was a high-quality product that sold for Dh1,650 each," Sharad said.
Around the same time, 1GB flash disks selling for well over Dh1,000 were becoming very popular so Merlin once again searched for its next big seller to compete in that segment with something completely new.
In partnership with Hitachi, Merlin soon came up with its new Pocket Hard Disk that could hold up to 8GB and, unlike the majority of stationary external hardrives at the time, was easily used on the fly.
"It didn't need any external power and you could carry it around with you. All you had to do was connect it with a USB," Rohit said.
"At the time you have to remember that it was double the 4GB that was standard in most laptops. Over a four-year period, it's probably been our biggest seller. We've easily sold more than 10,000 of these units," Sharad said.
Many friends and followers
The product line of original electronics products isn't the only thing growing at Merlin.
The Bachani brothers say that as the success of their business grows, so does its growing customer and fan base after years of careful attention to sales, service and following through with clients long after Merlin products leave the store.
If online social networking friends and followers are solid indicators of support, Merlin appears to be doing just fine.
"Our fan page on Facebook now has 22,000 members and we've reached 30,000 followers on Twitter," said Rohit.
For details, check out Merlin's Dubai-based website at www.merlin-digital.com
