From what I can tell, outside of the extremely tech-centric realms of society, smartwatches like pebble will not find any success.
Watches are both a utility device, as well as a fashion accessory. For most people, it has become mostly a fashion accessory first, a utility device second. Pebbles really don't look fashionable to most people, both on style, and on brand perception. People will put up with a bit of questionable styling if the brand signaling is good enough, but the reality is, the vast majority of people will not recognize a pebble, and instead will just see a not very stylish device on your wrist. As a fashion accessory, the pebble fails incredibly, and to build a scalable standalone watch company around watches which don't pass as fashion accessories is just a recipe for failure. Even the pebble steel isn't good enough.
So while people claim that the idea is good, the product is good, my opinion is that the product fails to do what most consumers actually need it to do. Sure, it had a big presence on paper because it was one of the first to bring the concept of smart watches to many people on kickstarter, but like that cooler which had a boom box, charging ports, and a blender, sometimes what gets people excited when they first see an idea online, doesn't actually translate to a product that fits their actual needs.
I think this may be why almost all the smartwatches are transitioning to fitness tracking as the main feature - the idea of what a fitness tracker is, looks like, and signals is very different from a smartwatch. Additionally, it's helpful that fitness tracking is actually a utility that generally can't be done well in other devices (smartphones).
The Pebble is a bit like a calculator watch in the early 80's: terribly exciting to those of us who like 7-8 year old me thought the idea of having something hi-tech on my wrist was awesomely cool, and a big, flashing sign saying "geek" (and not in fashionable hipster-playing-geek kind of way, but in the "badly dressed and socially awkward" kind of way) to people who are fashion conscious.
It's almost even worse than that: I don't care much about fashion, and I'm a big geek, but I still kinda judge the few of my friends and colleagues I see wearing smart watches. Watches have transitioned so strongly from "utility" to "fashion" with the rise of smart watches that anything that doesn't clearly look like it's intended to be a fashion accessory first or "ironic" and retro (like a cheap, low end, dumb digital watch) very easily ends up looking out of place and try-hard.
It's like my mind goes "No! you're not that important!" whenever I see someone receive a notification on one - it feels like it's a sign of obsession of self-importance that just steps over the line into caricature.
The difficult, of course, is that cellphones felt like that too - when I got my first cell phone in the mid 90's, it made me feel like now we were "properly doing business", while at the same time certain people definitively were judging.
So it's hard to tell if this is just because it's new, and whether - if it changes - it will change because companies bring out models that satisfies the fashion conscious, or if it will become more acceptable to wear a watch that looks utilitarian again.
I'm perfectly fine with being called a jerk by someone who by judging me on the basis of a single comment demonstrates they're not worth paying attention to.
I generally agree. However I have a Pebble Time Round (awful name) and people are consistently surprised when I mention that it's a smart watch as it does look as good as any other similarly priced watch (noticeably everyone knows what a smart watch is).
I got an extra Pebble Time so I gave it my wife and she absolutely loves it. I think you're right about negative perception but I believe, in terms of utility, that smart watches do not need to be a niche as they are.
I pretty much can't live without my Pebble; going back to getting notifications on my phone seems like a big step backwards.
Their touch ones still look bad to me. I don't want featureless glass on my wrist when the screen's off and the screen looks worse than a real watch face when it's on (while not, IMO, being more useful than just grabbing the phone in my pocket). The hybrid ones look OK (not great, but that is to some degree a taste thing), but they're not what I think most people would call smartwatches.
I don't mean to disparage the company, but in the watch world a Fossil (or Timex, Nixon, Citizen) will never be worth a glance. This is a market where low-end examples cost as much as a Honda.
Given the buying price is reported as 40 million, I think you could have run a very nice early adopter focused business in that range. No need to cross the chasm...focus on your real customers first. Battery life is a great selling point for example. They could have been fine if they'd delayed the crossing until later with say a "Pebble Style" line.
Possibly, but it would've taken a lot longer to get there without the VC that demands continued growth. Fast followers might've hurt them sooner if they didn't have the resources to quickly iterate the product. It is interesting to examine the strategies by which you can stay small and focused in a tech hardware market — capital requirements make it difficult or at least slow to do without that fundraising millstone.
From what I can tell, outside of the extremely tech-centric realms of society, smartwatches like pebble will not find any success.
Watches are both a utility device, as well as a fashion accessory. For most people, it has become mostly a fashion accessory first, a utility device second. Pebbles really don't look fashionable to most people, both on style, and on brand perception. People will put up with a bit of questionable styling if the brand signaling is good enough, but the reality is, the vast majority of people will not recognize a pebble, and instead will just see a not very stylish device on your wrist. As a fashion accessory, the pebble fails incredibly, and to build a scalable standalone watch company around watches which don't pass as fashion accessories is just a recipe for failure. Even the pebble steel isn't good enough.
So while people claim that the idea is good, the product is good, my opinion is that the product fails to do what most consumers actually need it to do. Sure, it had a big presence on paper because it was one of the first to bring the concept of smart watches to many people on kickstarter, but like that cooler which had a boom box, charging ports, and a blender, sometimes what gets people excited when they first see an idea online, doesn't actually translate to a product that fits their actual needs.
I think this may be why almost all the smartwatches are transitioning to fitness tracking as the main feature - the idea of what a fitness tracker is, looks like, and signals is very different from a smartwatch. Additionally, it's helpful that fitness tracking is actually a utility that generally can't be done well in other devices (smartphones).