Dreame must close the 1% conviction gap in India

Dreame Technology entered India at the end of 2023 with machines that promise to take the effort out of cleaning. Managing director Manu Sharma says the early years are about something else: building the brand and earning consumer trust.

For a category this new, trust is not a support function. It is the product.

A conviction problem, not a distribution problem

Sharma estimates robot vacuum penetration in India at about 1% or less, even though category volume is growing 60–70% every year. Dreame is growing at more than 100% annually, and its share has jumped from around 5% in 2023 to nearly 30%.

Those numbers point to a familiar adoption challenge. A product can be available without being accepted. Buyers are not rejecting Dreame’s technology as much as they are hesitating to change how they clean.

Wet cleaning is the real Indian test

Indian homes often do not feel clean without wet mopping. Sharma calls it an “obsession with cleaning with wet solutions so that they feel it is actually clean.” That local ritual is a compatibility hurdle for any global robot vacuum brand.

Dreame’s answer is product adaptation, not just translation: combined vacuuming and mopping, mops that lift on carpets, larger water tanks and dust capacities, and wet-and-dry stick vacuums for quick spills.

Show the machine, then ask for the money

At Rs 20,000 to Rs 1.35 lakh, robot vacuums are high-consideration purchases. A listing on Amazon or Flipkart may create discovery, but Sharma says many buyers “want to see a demonstration of the product, how it really works, and how it moves around.”

The 2025 Croma partnership, store promoters, virtual demos, Kriti Sanon as brand ambassador, and a service network across 160 cities all play the same role: they make an unfamiliar behaviour observable and safe to adopt. Dual-income households, families with children, and pet owners may not share a demographic, but they share a wish to reduce manual chores.

What marketers can steal

When penetration is around 1%, the task is less about awareness and more about fitting the product into a worldview. The adoption logic maps neatly onto diffusion thinking:

• Compatibility: Speak to wet cleaning and existing routines, not generic suction power.
• Trialability: Put live demos in stores and real homes where buyers can watch.
• Observability: Influencers show the machine finishing a chore, not just talking about it.
• Relative advantage: Southern India, where household help can be hard to find, delivers almost 50% of category business.

Dreame’s growth suggests the opportunity is real. Its next phase depends on turning low penetration into daily habit, one clean floor at a time.

Source: Afaqs!