Fitbit’s Biggest Product Flub

How Fitbit’s decision to combine the activity tracker and band into one integrated unit forced product mundaneness

On the heels of Fitbit’s IPO announcement valuing it at nearly $3.1 billion, I wanted to spend some time talking about what I view as Fitbit’s hugest product flub: its decision to combine the activity tracker with the band into one integrated product as opposed to staying with the original removable tracker model. While an integrated product is beautiful from an engineering standpoint, this decision ruined the customizability of the product and essentially forced product mundaneness. What Fitbit seems to fail to understand is that its consumers have to wear its product on their wrists day in and day out and people get tired of wearing the same thing every day.
Old Fitbit Flex with removable activity tracker and replaceable band (help.fitbit.com) New Fitbit Charge: integrated activity tracker and band (www.fitbit.com)

I’ve had my Fitbit for about three months now. While I eagerly wore it the first week or so, I’ve gotten so bored of strapping the same, bland thing on my wrist it’s almost a chore to wear it everyday. Tech Republic recently reported on a study that suggested that 50% of users lose interest within the first couple months of using a wearable so clearly I’m not the only one.

Wrist Real Estate is Special

What consumers wear on their wrists is something incredibly personal. What you wear on your wrist is something people notice immediately. You are broadcasting something about yourself with what you put there and you want that something to be meaningful. Unfortunately, standing for “health consciousness” simply isn’t a compelling enough association to keep people wearing a Fitbit.

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When I was in elementary school, Livestrong bands were the hottest thing. All of my classmates had one, often multiple, and they wore them, every day, religiously, because it was incredible to be part of a movement that stood for something — in this case, charity and funding cancer research. Livestrong created a movement around their bands that people were proud to stand behind but, more importantly, proud enough to commit to wearing a conspicuous bright yellow band every day for. This is really hard to get people to do.

Fitbit, to some extent, did have the Livestrong effect for a time. Fitbit stood for being health conscious and fit. Wearing one was a commitment to healthy living and the quantified self movement, which was pretty cool. Its initial commercial success is a strong reflection of the success of this association. To cushion it from the caprices of faddiness in the future though, Fitbit has to make a choice of either 1) investing in its own brand/find a story compelling enough that users will stand behind, or 2) increase the ability of Fitbits to match customer’s individual style.

Option 1

I want to argue that the first is really, really difficult as most movements suffer from short-lived faddiness if their message isn’t compelling enough. Among corporate brand stories, socially minded ones often offer the most sustainable, long-term and powerful associations (case in point, Warby Parker or Toms). Fitbit can certainly try linking itself to some sort of social cause but this could potentially be confusing and incongruous with its established health conscious spin. Further, since it didn’t start with this focus from the beginning like Warby Parker, a sudden eagerness to associate itself with a social cause come across as fake or disingenuous. Brands spend their entire existence building up an association with something — it’ll be hard for Fitbit to come up with a new one so late in its life. Further, from a brand standpoint, I think Fitbit would be hard pressed to match the strength of the brand of its primary competitor, Jawbone. Jawbone stands for beautiful design-focused hardware; its products exude a beautiful and classy/luxurious fashionableness. Fitbit has none of that. Despite being a $100+ dollar product, it does not feel classy — it feels sporty and minimalistically bland but very commonplace and definitely not luxurious.

Option 2

The second option is to increase customization and embrace the fact that people only want to wear something on their wrist every day if they feel that it authentically reflects them. The Tory Burch collaboration which offered fashionable Fitbit bands with different prints, for example, was extraordinarily powerful because it allowed customers to choose something else for their Fitbit to stand for. Fitbit really screwed up, in my opinion, by moving to the integrated product because it meant consumers no longer had freedom over what their Fitbit looked like. Now, the Fitbit is the same band, color, and design day in and day out. From my personal experience, at first it was cool to associate myself with “fitness consciousness” but it wasn’t a compelling enough story that I felt happy to put on my Fitbit every day, especially given the bland design of the device and the fact that ballpark step counting features are mimicked by the accelerometer on my phone.

Tory Burch for Fitbit (http://www.marinmagazine.com/Blogs/Fashion-Home-and-Beauty/July-2014/Tory-Burch-for-FitBit/)

With the new generation of Fitbits, the Burch collaboration no longer works because the band and the tracker are a single integrated product. As a result, Fitbit has curtailed many, many partnerships that could have happened with the likes of Coach and Kate Spade, not to mention passed on profits from high margin band accessories. It was a huge mistake for Fitbit closed the door to tons of potentially great collaborations with luxury brands and a huge mistake for Fitbit to dictate that its customers had to buy and wear the same bland band every day. Especially for women, I think wearing something on our wrists that allows us to be classy and fashionable (or even just another color) some days would be a huge selling point.

Fitbit has become dull because it failed to recognize that people want customizability and dislike mundaneness, especially in a product they are expected to display proudly on their wrist every day. Bringing back exchangeable bands and increasing luxury brand collaborations will do wonders for the monotony wearers feel and increase appeal to the mass-market audience by allowing people to wear something that says something about them beyond just that they are health conscious.