Battered but not beaten, Kairos has a second crack at building up its smartwatch brand

Second time lucky, perhaps? Kairos, the South Korean startup that promised an amazing Swiss hybrid smartwatch but has not yet delivered, is now back with a new model that’s very different.

Whereas the original Kairos model was a mechanical watch with a semi-opaque screen for smart notifications from your phone, the new Kairos T-band is a smart strap with a curved LED screen that can be attached to any existing analog watch. So your Swatch or your Rolex can be turned into a smartwatch.

The T-band is now crowdfunding on Indiegogo where the startup is hoping to raise US$50,000. The T-band, which comes with a Kairos Swiss watch face, costs from US$199, though cheaper variations are available for those who want a pure analog watch – or you could just buy the smart strap itself.

Kairos founder Sam Yang insists that this is not an admission of failure with its first watch. “Our hybrid watch project is not canceled nor is it pushed back due to the T-band. The biggest misconception we are getting is that we abandoned that project, therefore we scammed people, or that we lost focus,” he explains to Tech in Asia. Yang adds:

In fact, we launched the T-band more for our pre-order customers than anyone. We had about 15 percent of our customers who fell in love with our designs and asked if we can just sell the analog watch because the transparent display had only 40 percent transparency [so] it was blocking out the design too much for them. For some they don’t mind and want the cool factor of a transparent display. However, in order to provide more options for everyone, we came up with the T-band and launched prior to shipping the hybrid models so that our hybrid pre-order customers can choose before we make and ship their products.

So the original will eventually come out, but there’s no shipping date yet. The hybrid watch attracted US$1.4 million in pre-orders, so a lot of people are left waiting.

This is the new T-band in close-up:

Wearable woes

A number of gadgets that have come out of crowdfunding campaigns have turned out to be lemons, and that’s making people justifiably wary of trusting startups they’ve never heard of.

Yesterday, a review of Ring went viral online, showing that the Kickstarter gizmo is barely functional and so thick that it’s not really wearable. “It’s a piece of shit,” says the reviewer from Snazzy Labs of the US$269 gadget. “It’s not worth five dollars.”

Yang admits that’s made it bad timing for Kairos to be coming out with a second watch after not shipping the first one:

I think the overall timing of things also affects us. Many people have claimed to have been burned by other projects like Kreyos, Agent, and so on. Their failure to deliver what customers expected has turned many believers into doubters. And it’s affecting us as well as other wearable companies.

But Yang and the Kairos team remains confident of producing a quality product that will please buyers – once the T-band finally ships in April 2015.

Building a brand

Kairos has raised US$1 million from strategic investors in order to build up the new brand – and, full disclosure, won second place at our Startup Arena pitching battle in Singapore in May. It will soon reveal full details, Yang says, of major partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Misfit.

“In the next two to three months we will have even bigger news coming up. But for now, we are just so thankful and grateful of what we have accomplished,” he says.

A common problem faced by hardware startups is securing production capacity – and that’s certainly been an issue for the smartwatch crew. That was compounded by Kairos needing a design change. “The downside is that we had to go through a design change and two supplier changes – common for startups as we get bumped around by bigger companies taking up supply chains. We found better replacements who are dedicated, but all this has caused two to three months of delays.”

See: Long-awaited Razer Nabu smartband up for pre-order in US

This post Battered but not beaten, Kairos has a second crack at building up its smartwatch brand appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Battered but not beaten, Kairos has a second crack at building up its smartwatch brand