Dan Wakeford lives in Irvine, California, USA. He is an experienced policeman and a jogging enthusiast. He likes to listen to rhythmic electronic music while running outdoors, like Pitbull's electronic dance music, leaving the music, he said that he can only hear his sad gasping when running.
However, the surrounding police colleagues will warn him from time to time. It is a bad habit to listen to noisy music while running outdoors, which makes people naturally ignore the dangerous signals around them. With the popularity of smart electronic products, people are beginning to enter an "environmental isolation" state, they are indulged in the virtual environment created by electronic products, and lack of conversation with people. A 2012 report showed that three-quarters of American pedestrians wore headphones in the event of an injury or death caused by a car crash. This situation is even more serious in the UK. According to reports from the UK Transport Bureau, there are 17 traffic accidents in the UK due to listening to the iPod.
But Wakeford admits that it's hard to give up this habit now, and he tries to find a way to compromise: when running, one earphone is stuffed into the ear and the other is stuffed into the shirt. After trying it a few times, he found that the headphone cord would always wobble irregularly, and the left and right ears sounded unbalanced, which made him have to interrupt this practice.
But in May of this year, Wakeford finally found a solution. He began to wear the bone conduction earphone AfterShokz while listening to music. The special feature of this type of earphone is that you can listen to music without plugging the earphone into the ear, and you can clearly perceive other sounds around you.
The product principle of the bone conduction earphone is to place the earphone on the cheek bones on both sides. The sound wave is directly transmitted to the inner ear through the skull vibration without passing through the eardrum, forming a stable sound propagation path, avoiding the sound mixed in the noisy environment and being inaudible.
Wakeford said that during the first 45-minute jog on the AfterShokz, he noticed more details than ever before, such as a dog screaming while running through the neighbors' front yard, and a runner trying to get behind him. Beyond him, some cyclists will press two cycling to remind them that they are preparing to pass by him. "Now it's not a perfect product, such as the sound quality and the problem of sound leakage, but in any case, it provides a solution for outdoor enthusiasts," Wakeford said.
"Bone conduction headphones free your ears, even in high-decibel headphones music environment, you can clearly hear any sound around, no damage to the eardrum." AfterShokz manufacturer's voice technology founding Chen Yu said.
Outdoor sports enthusiasts like Wakeford are the target group for AfterShokz. Chen Wei believes that the application of bone conduction headphones is more extensive. In addition to the blind areas of GPS navigation and deaf-mute repair headphones, large manufacturers are also deeply interested in it. "Ford has talked to us, their workers like to work while listening to music, but wearing closed headphones can be very unsafe, and everyone can't communicate. Workers need such products." Chen Wei believes that bone conduction headphones Not a competitor of traditional headphones, he hopes that bone conduction headphones can open up a new consumer market and become the "second earphone" that people are willing to use in special scenes.
The hardware company founded in Shenzhen in 2001 is currently the largest manufacturer of military headphones in Asia. The company has not disclosed its specific market share, but said it is second only to Motorola in this segment. At the end of 2011, the military headset manufacturer began to enter the consumer electronics market. AfterShokz is the consumer bone conduction headset brand launched by Voice, and its US subsidiary was established in California in the same year.
In the past two years, the company’s business style and “Made in China†have consistently positioned in the opposite direction. Its wired headsets with Mike are priced at $70 to $80, Bluetooth headsets are $100, and headsets with bone conduction technology are typically between $30 and $70, making AfterShokz less than half a year old. 80% of the physical retail channels in the United States, including Best Buy, Office Depot and so on.
Chinese brands that enter the US mainstream retail channels with their own brands are rare. In September 2012, when the Wall Street Journal revealed “Innovative Technology Products of the Yearâ€, Voice Technology entered the final list of ten global technology companies. This is one of the few Chinese brand consumer electronic hardware products that have won the favor of mainstream media in the United States.
After Shokz's US head Bruce Borenstein believes that the core still has to return to the product itself, AfterShokz has a unique product technology. The difficulty in turning military products into consumer products is that the sound and audio of military bone conduction headphones are between 2000 and 4000 Hz, because special occupations only need to transmit voice, but if you need to listen to music with bone conduction headphones, The bandwidth must reach above 11,000 Hz.
Half a century ago, bone conduction headphones began to be used in the military field, but limited by high power consumption and battery life, large-volume military bone conduction headphones are difficult to transform into consumer products.
Through the transformation of the acoustic structure of the product, the voice has made a series of optimizations on the volume, power consumption and sound wave bandwidth of the bulky military bone conduction earphone. For example, replacing the plastic casing of the fixed fax sheet with a gasket, the improvement of this material reduced the original product volume by 30%. In order to widen the audio Hertz, it uses two diaphragms, one piece of metal and one piece of plastic. This allows the resonant peak generated by the bone conduction speaker to reach a stable flat band, and the transmitted sound will not be distorted.
Like most hardware manufacturers in Shenzhen, the beginning of the voice technology began with the “cottageâ€. At first, Chen Hao planned to imitate a Japanese bone conduction mobile phone headset called “Temcoâ€, which was manufactured by Motorola. At that time, a pair of Temco headphones sold for several thousand dollars, but the actual cost was less than 100 yuan. Chen Yu, who graduated from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University in the early 1990s, believed that the acoustic technology and funding threshold of such products were not high. After studying the product structure of Temco, Chen Hao and two university students gathered 250,000 yuan. Start the fund and start a business.
For small companies, the complex supply chain is a big problem in the initial development. When producing the first product, the FBB1000, Chen Hao devoted most of his energy to finding suppliers and mold factories. He often rides a motorcycle to and from Shenzhen and Dongguan. "Many raw materials are not sold in China, or the quality of materials is not good. For example, piezoelectric ceramics, Japan can only be as big as a matchstick, but at that time Chinese suppliers were the most Good can only achieve the size of the thumb, the surface is not even." Chen Yu said.
A year later, Chen Hao collected raw materials from more than 20 suppliers, and the first generation of molded products FBB1000 produced 100 batches, which was priced at 100 yuan. The voice does not have its own factory. The simple production line was built in the rental house in Baoan District. Three women workers became the first workers. Subsequent developments went well. The second-generation product FBB2000 won the Product Innovation Award at the Shenzhen High-Tech Fair. A Hong Kong-listed company noticed the product and expressed its willingness to invest in the Angel Wheel. However, the contract was delayed and it was delayed for two years. This cooperation has not ended.
Financing failure forced the voice to choose product transformation. In the absence of working capital from 2007 to 2010, mobile phone products have undergone tremendous changes. Bone conduction headphones configured for mobile phones require excellent isolation (signal leakage), which can be updated faster and faster with mobile phone hardware iterations. Mobile phone manufacturers are beginning to ignore non-critical parameters such as isolation, but the isolation of mobile phones Once you're not doing well, you will see an echo or howling when you insert a bone conduction headset.
In order to survive, the voice began to adjust the market target according to the technical characteristics, they decided to enter the more vertical subdivision headset field. In the case of the initial start-up capital, Chen Hao posted an advertisement for the OEM walkie-talkie on a B2B e-commerce platform called Global Sources. In less than a week, he received an order for a US customer of 1000 walkie-talkies. Brought them $25,000 in revenue, and the business model based on OEM orders began to become the main business of Voice.
In the following six years, the annual revenue of Haoyin in the military headset market increased from 1 million yuan to 30 million yuan. Due to the limited capacity in the vertical market segment, the market growth rate of the military headset market began to slow down in early 2007. The three founders believe that it is possible to consider trying to develop a consumer bone conduction headset, which will be a new opportunity to enter the mass market.
The product idea of ​​the initial voice revolves around how to reduce the effectiveness. At that time, the bone conduction earphone had a defect—the power consumption of the product was 100 times that of the ordinary speaker. The technician wanted to put the charging function and the power amplifier chip on the USB interface, so that the product form was small and convenient, thus discarding the large shape with the battery. .
"After the product is made, we don't know who to sell at all." Chen Yu said. The original idea of ​​this product is sold to office workers, because the USB interface of the headset can only be used for PC. However, the biggest mistake of this product is to ignore the user's usage scenarios. The reality is that most Chinese bosses don't want to see employees working in the office wearing headphones.
In the early development process, “branding†for large enterprises was still the company's main income, and its customers included large electronic companies in Japan and Europe. For most Chinese hardware manufacturers, the exchange of low prices for orders is an important way to survive. “There are 3,000 headset manufacturers in Shenzhen, but none of them have their own brands,†Chen said. “Without brands. Can only do OEM work."
Even with core technology, the voice is still at the bottom of the ecological chain. At the 2012 CEBIT show in Handeway, Germany, most of the questions were savvy Jewish businessmen who knew this – when the price was pressed to only 5% profit, a large order of more than 50,000 was used. In exchange for cooperation. On the other hand, those large-scale home appliance companies that have been branded have also suffered setbacks in selling bone conduction headphones. They have introduced bone conduction headphones as a mature electronic product to the market, and after being handed over to a sales department, they are matured. The product line marketing approach works, but in reality, not many consumers know the purpose of bone conduction headphones.
The meager profits and the continuous loss of large customers have led Chen to decide to adjust the operation of the bone conduction headset products. He feels that for innovative hardware products, the US market will have a higher early paying population.
When attending the CES Consumer Electronics Show in 2012, Chen Hao decided to use "Voxlink" as the brand of bone conduction headphones. Things started to change, and the number of consumers who came to the booth began to increase dramatically. The queues of consumers in the booth were long queues, which quickly attracted the attention of mainstream American media gathered at CES. During the four-day exhibition, more than 30 media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and Wired reported on AfterShokz, not only consumers, but this high-density exposure made American technology companies aware that bone conduction technology began. Consumer product applications.
Apple is one of the interested companies, and its retail store channel manager found the voice team after the show. Although there was not much communication at the time, it provided an opportunity for cooperation between the two parties two years later. Since then, Apple has maintained its concern for bone conduction headphones. "They are very experienced. It is very difficult to iterate to know the innovative hardware. When they think that the first generation product concept is good, but the product is not good enough, it will not cooperate with you. Wait until the product passes all the tests before docking."
Chen Hao hopes to start a local team in the United States to do more localization of the product. After the 2012 CES show, Bruce Borenstein became the head of the voice in the US market. He was the Chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association of America, the organizer of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Desalination of Chinese brands is the first step in the changes that the Bruce team has made for voice products. In order to make the product look more beautiful, the original brand name "VoxLink" was replaced by "AfterShokz", which is similar to the pronunciation of the aftermath "Aftershock". When the name is pronounced, American consumers will naturally associate with sound waves.
In the second half of 2013, AfterShokz's products entered 80% of the US retail channels. At that time, the voice estimated that the market capacity was around 10 million pairs, but in the next half year they experienced sales bleak. One of the reasons is that retail channels put AfterShokz on the headset category shelf, but rarely do shop assistant training for this new product. The store salesperson often does not know how to promote the concept of bone conduction concept. "Many consumers will ask this question." Whether there is damage to hearing, why use batteries, why sell so expensive, what scenes will be used, these problems channel dealers are difficult to solve for you." Chen Yu said.
From the product itself, after the large-scale sales of the Bluez 1 series, users also reported large and small product problems, including two relatively serious design defects, one is the antenna problem, which caused the product to be unable to connect to the wireless. In addition, the waterproof and sweat-proof properties of the material are not suitable for sports enthusiasts. Once the material is not sweat-proof, the sweat will penetrate into the charging slot.
Chen Wei thought that AfterShokz sold a good concept at that time, but it has not yet become a good product, including wired S1 series and Bluetooth B1 series. "They are products that can be sold, but not screaming products. The gap is very big. If only the users who just need it buy this product, it is destined that this base is not big enough."
This makes the voice not to try to promote the product before improving the product. "As long as there is a little problem, the product will be returned or exchanged by the user in large quantities. If it is not the ultimate, this market will be difficult to do. The first is word of mouth, the second is to do a lot of user education on the basis of word of mouth, otherwise it will sell Do not move."
Since 2013, Haoyin has continuously improved its products based on user feedback and aging tests. The Bluez 2 wireless Bluetooth headset launched in August this year has done problems with antenna, dual microphone noise reduction, volume, weight, wearing comfort, and leakage. More than 30 optimization adjustments.
However, in the Chinese market, consumers have expressed different views on this American product. Wen Jingya, the brand director of Haoyin, said that quite a few Chinese users have no way to read the full name of “AfterShokzâ€. “For Chinese users, the syllables are too long, and the abbreviated foreign language brands are often more easily recognized by users.â€
At the same time, the earphone products priced at 699 yuan face more intense competition in the Chinese market. The voices believe that no earphone products and AfterShokz are the same products. Although these headphones have different product logic and form, people will still put Jawbone. Bone conduction Bluetooth headsets, Plantronics, Jabra and other brands are supposed to be competitors of AfterShokz, and the contrasting aspects tend to be biased towards sound quality, not use.
In 2014, AfterShokz began to reorganize the channels. They interrupted the cooperation with Wawart. Although Wawart has a large consumer flow in the United States, it often stimulates product sales with low price promotions. The price of bone conduction headphones sold in the US market is mostly distributed at 30%. Between the 70 dollars, the voice does not want the low price image to become the brand positioning of AfterShokz.
Another problem brought by offline retail channels is the lag in sales information. Retail stores can suppress goods, but they may not be sold completely. This makes it difficult to know how many products are sold and how many are still sold. Pressed in the store inventory. Once the second-generation product is launched, the old goods that are pressed into the channel will be returned to the manufacturer, which will cause huge losses.
Last year, the total sales of Haoyin Technology reached 70 million yuan. This year, the voice began to try online Internet marketing. They opened brand marketing stores in the e-commerce channels such as Jingdong Mall and Tmall. Another reason for the sales figures to look good is that Apple's Asia Pacific offline retail stores have begun to fully launch AfterShokz Bluez 2. Through Apple's strict channel quality testing, this has more or less brought Chen Hao confidence, he believes that the next year needs to do more promotion for the product.
Specifications
Speaker type: bone conduction speaker
Sensitivity: 100 ± 3dB
Frequency response range: 20Hz ~ 20000Hz
Microphone: -41dB ±3dB
Battery: rechargeable lithium polymer battery
Play time: >6 hours
Charging time: <3 hours
Weight: 43 grams
Effective distance: 10 meters
Warranty: 1 year (except for private demolition and personal damage)
Product model: AS500
Product accessories: MicroUSB charging cable × 1, elastic silicone strap × 1, storage box × 1
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