The watches also used energy-efficient E-Paper screens, which meant a typical Pebble watch could run for weeks and weeks on a single charge - which as anyone who has to charge their Apple Watch twice per day can attest - remains a killer feature. Instead of a touchscreen, Pebble watches used chunky, physical side buttons for navigation. Pebble would go on to release multiple lines of watches, ranging from the more professional Pebble Steel, the very watch-like Pebble Round (which eschewed the typical square smartwatch design for a round face), and the company’s final project: the fun, almost Swatch-like Pebble Time 2.Īlong the way, the company pioneered what a smartwatch could do and how it should function, developing health and data tracking features, notification and calendar functions, all largely from scratch.
Pebble would spend years atop Kickstarter’s record book, and the company’s product line remains among the most successful crowdfunding projects in history. In the first 24 hours we raised $500,000. Our intern was the most optimistic, he thought we’d get $20,000. I realistically thought we might raise $5,000 on the first day. “Our original goal was $100,000 for the month-long campaign. “The night before our campaign started the four of us at Pebble were making predictions about how much money we’d raise on Kickstarter,” Migicovsky said. When the campaign’s clock hit zero, they’d raised more than $10 million. They hoped to raise $100,000 to get a modest run of Pebble watches produced. Looking to do something more ambitious with broader appeal, Migicovsky and his team developed the Pebble watch and decided to sidestep more traditional tech funding routes and took their pitch straight to consumers on Kickstarter.
As Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky explained to Paste, his team already had some experience figuring out the tentpoles of how a potential smartwatch might work, having started back in 2008 with the inPulse watch designed for Blackberry phones (it found some modest success, but didn’t move the needle). It was in that wild west of consumer technology, circa 2012, that Pebble Technology decided to take its burgeoning smartwatch expertise to the masses with a crowdfunding campaign to offer the company’s first formal product: the Pebble watch. But flashback a decade ago, and the idea of smartwatches and wearable technology was nascent, nerdy and largely unproven.
Apple Watches and Fitbits are ubiquitous today. But had a few things gone a bit differently over the past few years? It could’ve been. If you’re crafting a list of influential tech giants, Pebble Technology probably isn’t all that close to the top of it.
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