Hong Kong
Fashion-conscious design is the best tactic to help push the slowly growing wearable technology market into a well deserved boom, industry leaders say. Though wearable technology items, such as health monitoring wristbands and smart watches, have been prominent on the Australian market since 2013 adoption by the general public has been slow.
And, according to Jack Chau, Director of Hong Kong-based wearable technology company Inno Lifestyles Ltd, that’s all down to one thing: style. “It’s not enough to have a good working product, it also needs to look fashionable before consumers are willing to commit,” Chau told Appliance Retailer at the 2014 Hong Kong Electronics Fair & ICT Expo. “Wearables are so personal that they need to be almost invisible.”
In essence, a Smart Watch needs to look like a fashionable piece of jewellery first and a piece of high-end technology second. With a category designed to be as visible as wearable technology, novelty isn’t enough to make money change hands. And Chau should know.
In April 2013 he successfully crowd funded the Flaxus, a wearable touch screen stylus in the form of snap bracelet. Available in a range of colours, the Flaxus is designed to conceal that it is anything other than a stylish bracelet. In 2014, Inno Lifestyles is preparing to launch their next piece of stylish wearable tech: the Beats Beanie.
While appearing to be a normal (if fashionable) beanie to any outside observer, inside the headwear are concealed two slimline bluetooth headphones woven into the fabric. Wearers simply link their beanie to their smartphone and can be streaming music straight to their now warm ears in seconds.
From a small set of buttons on the outside, hidden in the logo, the wearer is able to control the playback of their music discretely. The Beats Beanie also contains a directional microphone, meaning that you don’t even need to take your beanie off to make or receive phonecalls.
Last week, executives from Intel met with members of the Council of Fashion Designers of America to discuss the future of the wearable tech industry. The verdict was unanimous: wearable technology shouldn’t look like wearable technology. And fashion designers are in agreement.
New York jewellery fashionista Pamela Love quipped, “Wearing tech is not that cool. It needs to be something completely invisible. It needs to be seamless.”
However, it was Intel’s ‘New Devices Group’ vice president of business development and strategy, Ayse Ildeniz, that summed up their position best: “Wearables are very personal things, they are things that we wear on us, somehow we need to be emotionally connected to them, we choose to wear them. With that in mind, the fashion industry should be in the driver’s seat for this.”