 Bumb, bum, bum, bum, bum. This is high-tier noise cancellation. The best part of these headphones? Easy. 100% this design. I think they look dope. Guys, these are $99. This is probably the coolest pair of earphones you can get for $99. Still the very beginning. Which one is next? This here. So, guys, you had a quick intro by Eları on. But let me give you a quick overview of nothing before sort of deep diving into the genesis of the brand. So Nothing is a London consumer tech brand. We founded the company about a year ago. Today, we've raised $75 million. And among our investors, we have Google Ventures and people like Tony Fadel, the inventor of the iPod, Casey Neistat, Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, and a few other people. Earlier this summer, we released our first product, the Nothing A1. Overall, now, we've shipped about 250,000 units. And over 400,000 units have been ordered. We're just trying to catch up on demand. So it has definitely been a hell of a year, quite intense. But before actually going into it, I thought it would be cool to start from those logo quiz that became quite popular in social media a few years back. So how many of those logos can you recognize? Can you raise your hand as I can recognize more than six logos? OK. What about seven? Seven. What about eight? Anyone? You got the eight? Cool, come find me at the end. You just won a new pair of A1. Actually, Black Edition, we released today. Cool. So just a bit of warm-up. So here are the answers. So as soon as you saw those logos, like some you recognize instantly, some might have looked familiar, but you couldn't just recall the name. And some didn't ring a bell, and that's OK. Moreover, what you didn't consciously realize is that for some of those logos, as soon as you saw them, not only they helped you recognize a brand, but that moment where the name popped in your head is actually triggered some sense of emotion. And one could eventually define this as brand equity to some extent. And every sort of company nowadays should be thriving towards that. And it doesn't matter if you're selling hardware or developing a deep take B2B solution. In today's world, which is like commonizing more and more, like brand has the potential to be your true competitive advantage, and also one of the assets that can be the most valuable to you. So you see some people define as brand being everything you do with intention to be recognized. But it's actually much more than that. It's like how you are basically perceived as a company and basically touching upon the softer values. And it's super important to get this right, because that's what eventually will drive your company valuation to crazy multiples on top of attracting like A-class talent and so on. But this, I guess, is not easy task, right? Especially in today's world, with everything going around us, like our attention span has run super thin, right? So I think it's super important to get that right. Especially as a brand, if you manage to address brand the right way, then eventually you drive like brand loyalty, and people will be able to pay even a premium to buy your products. So here, for instance, Apple in Q2 earlier this year, they shipped 30% of the total units of smartphone, generated 40% of revenue, and managed to bank 75% of the total profit generated. But cool. Where do you start as a brand? So first, it's really about putting your story together, right? Like when you start a business, one way or the other, you're trying to solve a problem. And it's very important that you clearly define what that problem is early on. That's really basically your first step. And if you are clear on that, that's how you're going to create that first kind of emotional connection with your audience, and where you're going to start kind of building equity. So with nothing going into this, there was two key things kind of we wanted to address. Like basically, we weren't really happy with the current state of the industry. One was that things were becoming a bit more and more boring in a way, right? Like products looking more and more the same. It almost felt like the artists sort of left the industries that all were left were like business people and just like cool specs. So it was really something we wanted to address. The other thing is like we've been hearing about this kind of IoT thing and like building a fully functioning ecosystem. But actually today, we've got Apple on one end, which has a super great experience when it comes to kind of building that ecosystem. But it's quite kind of restrained in terms of product categories and closed in a way. And then the other side, you have brands that do a multitude of products. But then you have different apps for different products and basically that whole kind of ecosystem experience is a bit broken. Some of the products don't even like connect with each other. So once you've defined this, it's super important for us to really kind of align this among your founding team, right? Like everyone needs to be on the same page. Super important. Then once you've got this, it's really what you're going to do about it, right? So for us, I mean, in more corporate ways, it's basically defining your mission and vision. So for us, our mission was like craft, iconic, and seamlessly connected tech products that basically were proud to share with our friends and family, quite self-explanatory. Then our vision is a world without barriers between people and technology. And here, barriers, we mean everything that comes in the way in terms of technological adoption, right? This can be the user experience. It can be you not liking a specific design or any sort of trust issues, for instance, related to data privacy or whatever it could be. So this is super important to be in place, whether you're an early stage company or thinking about building your own company. Make sure you define what's the problem you're solving and making sure to define what you're going to do about it. And that needs to be fully aligned among your founding team. So once that's done, it's really about defining your visual identity. Like visual identity is any sort of graphical elements or imagery which basically now people to recognize your brand. And going to this exercise, make sure to sort of benchmark the world with your competitors, right? Like to make sure there is no overlap or that you don't go too deep into one direction to realize that the company next to you is doing the exact same thing or using the same grand colors. But actually, before even going into this, for us it was about figuring out the name of the company. So when we're thinking about it, we really want to have that red thread between our vision mission so that you have that sort of coherence. And yeah, we're looking into the great gods, mythology, and heroes, and all that stuff. But at the same time, trying to envision what nothing is going to be in 20, 30 years time. And we got ourselves in this kind of black mirror scenario where you have your table, you drink your coffee, you have your creative content, you then go take your shower, the content follows you through the mirror, then you turn on the shower, your music kicks in, then you go to your wardrobe, your outfit is pre-selected, depending on the day and on your mood, then you jump into your car, it takes you to whatever you were meant to go. And basically, you don't have to do anything. And you're in this kind of ambient user experience where eventually technology feels like nothing. And actually, our CEO, Carl Pei, kind of mentioned, what if we just go with nothing? It did take a bit of time to align all the founding team, but eventually we decided to stick to it. But then once that's done, often what sends you back to the join board is that you need to make sure you have the relevant e-commerce and then all the social media handles. So luckily now we're managed to get the nothing.tech quite easily. And then social media, fun enough, you couldn't register, but they weren't being used. So we literally just asked Instagram and Twitter to get the at nothing. And just a few weeks later, we had the handles. So sometimes, don't be afraid to ask. So once we had our name done, it's really about sorting out your logo. So we want to be the wild and be the in. This was our first literally first exploration. But again, like nothing ticked. It didn't feel coherent or something meaningful. So make sure when you go into that exercise, try to find that red thread. So for us, we're very back to our vision, a world without buyers between people and technology. And eventually, it got us into the whole kind of manufacturing world, where technology is actually being built. And I'm sure a lot of you have seen this kind of dot matrix being used. So it's something people are super familiar with. And eventually, that's how we decided to go with that finish for our logo. It had this kind of rawness, lightness, and also like sense of refinement to it. We then tried to look in some sort of imperfection. Sometimes, in your logos, it's good to look for those. It sort of attracts the eye. But yeah, for us in this case, it sort of didn't work. We just ended up here. So once that's done, once your logo is sorted, it's really about defining your color palette. Same here. Really try to think, what's a coherent story here? You want to convey, right? Make sure that red thread is in place. So for us, we took inspiration from the IBM mainframe area. It was a period of time where there was so much enthusiasm around technology. It was really kind of moving forward in society. And we thought it would be cool to get that as an inspiration for our color palette. So then once that's done, you have to kind of look into your typography or any sort of user touch point. Make sure those are being well defined. I'm not going to go into those details. Come find me at the end if I can take you through all the different elements that constitutes our visual identity. But yeah, for us. Then third point, I mean, that might have got across. It's really about being consistent. If you're really serious about brand, consistency is key. Everything needs to sit under the same roof. Super, super, super important. From what you do to how you do things, and with the starting point, your mission and vision, that's what will eventually build that kind of brand equity. So it's then about really defining all your different guidelines. Making sure those are in place. Those are the sort of boring stuff. But your visuality and making sure all the different touch points are being super consistent is something super important as a brand. Don't leave that just out there and think that people will sort it out. Make sure everything has been documenting and clarified across the board. And then for us, early on, from the value proposition standpoint, your visual identity is one thing. But your value proposition is actually the most important thing there. So for us, when it comes, we touched base before that one of the things we want to resolve is products look more and more the same. So we're really keen into finding a design identity we could own. So quite rapidly, this was our concept one. We went down this semi-transparent route. But then transparency takes time. Because basically all the components inside the product become part of your design. So you need to kind of customize everything. And like going to level of detail, which seems to take a lot, a lot of time. And really early on last year, this year, sorry, we had committed that we're going to release our first product in the first half of the year, both towards the market and investors. But I guess that was a bit, us being a bit too confident. Because halfway through, we realized that with transparency, actually the product development lead time much longer. And when it comes to that, so the earbuds were going in the right direction, but the actually case, we came to a point that we almost were thinking about for the case of the product to not make it transparent, like use something like off the shelf like all the other companies are using. But eventually, as a founding team, we sat down, looked back to our mission. As the first product, we couldn't get corrupt on that. We had to live up to it. So we decided to kind of postpone the launch by one and a half month. And just making sure we had a true product was coherent all the way across. So once you got those kind of foundation, your brand foundation in place, it's a super important thing. And across my career, there hasn't been anything more powerful than having a friend or a family member coming to use and, hey, you know, there is this new brand. They're doing X, Y, Z. And they are awesome. Like none of the marketing can beat that. So once you got your foundation in place, really think on how you're going to empower advocacy. And in other terms, like how you're going to manage your community of users. And it has to be something meaningful. It has to be a win-win thing. Otherwise, at some point, it will collapse in the long run. So for us, what we did here, so we did our series A. And then we decided to do crowdfunding, so basically enabling the general public to invest in the company. So we allocated at the time 1.5 million. Yeah, and overall, I guess it was a bit nuts because we hadn't even announced a product. But overall, we had like 25,000 people registering to the crowdfunding with a registering interest of over $35 million. So therefore, the allocation, like, the run-out was completed in less than a minute. Unfortunately, only 400 people managed to invest in the company. So that community, private community, is quite small at the moment. But at least it gives us time to make sure we have the right process in terms of how you engage your community and then how you drive that advocacy out of it. It's something super important to think of. And then in the future, like for our next crowdfunding, it's something we're going to kind of keep on repeating. We're definitely going to think how we can maximize So then, I guess, last and not least, is like keeping fresh and relevant. I think as a brand, you should never take things for granted and feel that you can settle at some point because your brand is getting a lot of traction. You need to stay fresh. You need to stay differentiated and in sync with everything that's going on around in the world. So for us, we're kind of thinking when we launch the first E1 product. When we look at all the product campaigns out there, it's like animated CGI stuff. And basically here, we're thinking, OK, what can we do something different? So we decided to bring those little bugs as part of our kind of imagery. And this is not random. Actually, there is a thought process to it. Like insects, when you kind of look into details, it feels almost like an artist that kind of has gone there and sort of refined all the single details. So it's something that felt quite coherent in terms of how we build our products with a whole transparency thing and needed to kind of customize all the internal components. So yeah, we merged the two together, and this was a sort of final result. And it did get a lot of traction. It did stand out from our competitors. So make sure even your creative campaigns, like how can you really kind of stand out from everything that's out there? Then yeah, then I mean, StockX. So it's an e-commerce platform where people like trade the whole kind of limited shoe and so on. And so we decided to kind of write that limited drop culture that you find in the sneaker, which is super relevant to the newer generations. And actually, funny enough, it was the first time they were doing a DropX with a consumer tech brand. Like none of the previous consumer tech brand I ever thought like working with those guys. And we're talking about like 60 million monthly visitors per month. So what we did here, we just engraved the first 100 products. It's actually a blind drop. It was even before we released the product. And we auctioned them. And yeah, the number one sold for over $1,000. So think, look at other industries. Like think a bit different. Like how can you really stand out and you'll go to market strategy? And then yeah, I guess this is fresh news from today. Earlier today we announced this new Black Edition that you're getting probably one of the first users. And yeah, so again, you need to stay in sync with everything that's going on around the world. Sustainability, big thing. So for us, we just finished the carbon footprint assessment of A1. And it's something we're going to gradually build upon. So A1 moving for big carbon neutral. Then we're also looking into whole kind of web three. I think for any new company now it's like, you need to see how relevant is your business and how you're going to integrate. So the whole kind of web three part, we're actively looking into it. And we're actually starting on the 13th of December by accepting cryptocurrency on our e-commerce. Same, it's like really about remaining relevant to wherever it's going around you. And yeah, I guess that's about it. So yeah, it was a quick overview on how we did things that nothing and yeah, how within a year time we managed to kind of cut from nothing to something. I don't know how you want to frame this, but yeah, I hope you had some takeaways that you could apply to your business and thank you everyone.