Wearables: Smart tech. Vague category.

Congratulations. You’ve just opened an email about wearables. This probably means that the world of brand building gets your pulse racing, and that’s exactly why we’ve written this newsletter for you.

This is OFF Brand — a newsletter by Koto, a team of brand specialists and optimists made up of designers, strategists, writers and art directors based in five major cities around the world.

In this newsletter we lift the lid on all things brand – from naming to nomenclature, identity to UI, pantones to pixels, and strategy to guidelines.

Our objective is to be your trusted voice on all things brand and to earn that trust, we draw from our own experiences and those of our peers, clients, experts and beyond. Expect practical tips, actionable insights, useful frameworks and inspirational examples. Just watch out for the occasional rabbit hole.

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What you’ll learn about this time

— The grandfather of wearables: the calculator watch
— Wearable tech’s identity problem
— Why 30% of wearables eventually end up abandoned
— The challenge of integrating AI
— Our trust issues with wearables
— The big four brand players
— Why friction isn’t always a flaw
— What the wearable tech industry needs to do to gain mass adoption

Watches set? OFF we go.

Wearing your heart rate on your sleeve

Health. A broad, complex and far-reaching topic. One best explained by a doctor or someone with medical expertise. However, in lieu of a PhD, we’re working with an extensive knowledge of early-2000s medical dramas and a solid grasp of the role brand is playing in a sector whose future feels both exciting and uncertain: health-tech wearables.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to the mid 1970s. Specifically, to a quiet moment of monumental cultural importance that went largely unnoticed except for a few diehard tech fans. That moment was the arrival of the world’s first ever calculator watch. In many respects, The Pulsar Time Computer Calculator was one of the first true, commercially successful electronic wearables. Featuring an LED display, a stylus, and a tiny keypad presumably designed for a lone ant, it allowed users to perform relatively complex mathematical tasks, take notes, and set a *digital* alarm. It was, arguably, the first mass popularisation of having a computer on your wrist.

Today, our bodies have become a live stream of health data. Smart watches and other wearable devices like rings, bracelets, and glasses have evolved to let us measure almost everything: heart rate variability, sleep stages, stress patterns, blood oxygen, glucose, temperature. But despite all this progress, the category still feels… awkward.

Wearables appear to sit in two distinct camps. On one side, you have the lifestyle and wellness crowd – people using devices to sleep better, manage stress or keep an eye on general health. On the other, you’ve got wannabee athletes, fitness enthusiasts and biohackers chasing marginal gains and optimisation. The two groups overlap, but they speak fundamentally different languages. One is about balance and wellbeing. The other is about performance and precision. And while both audiences are growing, neither camp has yet found the golden ticket: the point where wearable data becomes something the medical system genuinely trusts, rather than something users check between meetings.

Which raises a bigger question for the category. If wearables are no longer niche, but not quite mainstream, what exactly are they? Because until the category answers this question clearly – culturally, emotionally and practically – wearables risk going the same way as the humble calculator watch.

So if you want to take one thing away from this newsletter, it should be this: wearables have an identity problem. Brand is how you solve it.

From novelty to necessity

Perhaps this is a good moment to make something clear. This isn't exactly a niche category anymore. Today, wearables are everywhere. In just the first 3 months of 2025, over 45 million wrist-worn devices shipped globally.

And the behaviour has followed the hardware. Closing rings. Checking readiness scores. Comparing step counts. These rituals have quietly entered everyday life, from gyms and tech offices to family WhatsApp groups.

In the US alone, around 44% of people reportedly own some kind of body-worn health tracker. But it’s worth keeping a little perspective. Compared with the billions of smartphones in circulation, wearables are still a relatively small club. And for many users, the smartwatch is still a phone accessory first and a health device second. Which brings us back to the central tension. Wearables are widely adopted. But they’re not essential… yet.

The habit hurdle

Buying a wearable is easy. Making it part of your life is much harder. The novelty phase tends to look similar for most people. You unbox the device. Sync the app. Explore the charts. Maybe show a friend your sleep score or step count. For the first few weeks, the device feels interesting, perhaps even slightly magical.

But eventually that moment fades. The charts start to look familiar. The notifications start to repeat themselves. The question slowly shifts from “how many steps did I do today?” to something far more practical: “how is this helping me?”

And that’s where many devices struggle. Industry estimates suggest roughly 30% of wearables eventually end up abandoned. Not because the technology failed, but because the habit never quite formed. Which brings us to meaning. Data alone rarely changes behaviour. Insight sometimes does, but not always. Habits tend to form when a product manages to answer small, everyday questions in ways that feel useful. Should I take it easy today? Did I sleep well enough to train? Am I actually getting somewhere? These are simple yet surprisingly powerful questions. And answering them clearly, day after day, is what turns a gadget into something people genuinely live with.

AI enters the chat

This is why AI has arrived as the category’s latest solution. If raw data is not to the majority’s taste, the logic is simple: build something that interprets it. Instead of dashboards, give ‘em a coach. Apple has a “Workout Buddy.” Oura introduced its AI Advisor. WHOOP launched its own conversational coach.

But this shift introduces a new challenge. Because the moment a device starts giving advice about your health, it crosses an invisible line. If the advice feels generic, users lose trust. If the device nags too often, it becomes annoying. If the tone feels clinical or overconfident, people just ignore it altogether.

And it’s not just users paying attention. Clinicians have long been cautious about wearables. Not because the idea is flawed, but because most medical workflows aren’t built to absorb a constant stream of personal health data. A doctor doesn’t necessarily want to scroll through a week of sleep graphs during a ten-minute appointment. And the data itself can be messy. One thing we learned while working on Epic Life is that readings can vary widely between devices. A Whoop and an Apple Watch can give very different numbers for the exact same workout.

So when a wearable starts forming its own view of the data and then spits out a recommendation, the question becomes sharper: can I trust it? This is where brand and product experience become inseparable. The authority of the advice. The tone of the prompts. The moments when the device chooses to speak, and when it wisely stays quiet. Those details shape whether the relationship feels helpful or intrusive. And right now, much of the category is still figuring that out.

The Big Four: how the category is actually positioning itself

So what does all of this look like in the real world? The best way to understand the category is to look at the brands shaping it. Because while wearables are often talked about as one big market, the reality is a lot messier. Different brands are pulling different emotional strings.

Right now, four players do a particularly good job of showing how wide that spectrum is: Oura, WHOOP, Apple and Garmin. They’re in the same broad category but have very different philosophies about what wearing tech on your appendages should actually mean.

Oura: tech and fashion collide

Oura has quietly carved out one of the clearest identities in the entire category. What started life as a sleep tracker has gradually evolved into something closer to a wellness status symbol.

Where most wearables look like sports equipment, the ring looks like jewellery. And that small design decision changes everything about how the product fits into culture. Most wearable brands still frame health as performance. Oura frames it as awareness. The overall experience feels reflective rather than competitive, wrapped in an aesthetic that sits much closer to luxury wellness than sports technology. (Arguably Oura could go even further, making the ring more svelte and catering for people, men especially, who’d rather not wear a ring.)

You can see this clearly in the brand’s ‘Give Us the Finger’ campaign. Instead of recycling the usual anti-ageing clichés, the campaign reframed longevity as something joyful and active. The older generation was shown hiking, dancing and playing basketball while confidently wearing the ring. The double meaning had a bit of bite, but the strategic move underneath was very deliberate: position Oura around self-awareness, not youth obsession or elite performance.

The follow-up campaign – ‘Ring True To You’– pushed that on even further. New colourways and finishes launched, pushing the ring into fashion accessory territory. And it’s paid off. Oura’s reportedly tripled its revenue in four years. Not bad.

But the ring format also creates some interesting tensions. Oura’s biggest advantage is that it reads as jewellery first and technology second. That lowers the social barrier to wearing it and gives the product strong cultural appeal. The flip side is that some buyers inevitably question the depth of the insight. When aesthetics lead, people wonder how functional it really is.

Then there’s the price. At roughly $300–$400 plus a subscription, buying an Oura ring is a considered decision. And because the device has no screen, all of the meaning lives inside the app. For some users that’s friction. For others it’s exactly what makes the product feel unobtrusive.

This explains where Oura sits today. It’s desirable among design-led wellness consumers, tech leaders and early adopters. But it hasn’t quite crossed into the mainstream yet. That tension is the trade-off of sharp positioning. The clearer your identity, the more strongly you resonate with some people, and the more deliberately others opt out. Still, Oura has set an important precedent for the category. It proves that wearable technology doesn’t just need better sensors. It needs a clearer cultural role. And that is fundamentally a brand problem.

WHOOP: a clear identity that’s going cloudy

WHOOP goes the other way. From the beginning, it positioned itself less as a lifestyle device and more as serious training equipment. The brand borrowed heavily from the cultural playbook of performance sport: elite athletes, marginal gains and people looking sweaty. Olympians, NFL players and CrossFit athletes became the faces of the product. Wearing a WHOOP band started to signal something very specific: you take performance seriously.

In that sense, WHOOP chose an identity early and pushed it hard. The screenless band felt stripped back and purpose-built. Inside the app, the experience went deep: strain, recovery, sleep, coaching. For athletes and data-led users, this was just the ticket.

That clarity was an advantage. WHOOP knew exactly who it was for, and that made it credible. It didn’t need to charm everyone, it just needed to matter deeply to the people who cared.

But lately, WHOOP feels less sure of its role than it once did. The brand seems to be testing a broader identity: not just as a performance tool, but a premium health object too. The language is widening. The styling is widening with it. What started as a band for serious training and hardcore self-quantification is now edging into more elevated, luxury-adjacent territory.

WHOOP’s bigger challenge may be that the brand itself has never been as distinctive as the product. The strap is recognisable. The proposition is clear. But the identity around it is surprisingly faint. The logo is forgettable. The marketing language could belong to almost any performance-tech company. For a brand built on discipline and edge, there are few real icons to hold onto.

That hasn’t mattered while WHOOP has spoken to a narrow audience of committed athletes. In a niche, clarity can carry a lot of weight. But it becomes a problem the moment the brand tries to grow. If WHOOP wants to reach a broader health audience, something has to flex. The tone, the visual language, the brand architecture. Right now there isn’t enough identity to stretch without blurring.

And that’s the dilemma. Stay tightly focused on elite performance and growth eventually plateaus. Open the door to a wider market and the brand risks becoming fuzzier still. Either way, WHOOP will need more than product credibility to navigate the next phase. It will need a brand that can carry the weight.

Apple: does the Jobs

Apple didn’t launch the Apple Watch as a health device. Back in 2015 it was positioned as a luxury lifestyle accessory. There were gold editions, fashion partnerships and a clear attempt to place the product somewhere between technology and jewellery.

That version of the Watch never really stuck. But what replaced it was much stronger. Over the past decade, Apple has turned the Watch into something far more powerful than a luxury object: everyday health infrastructure.

This is Apple’s real achievement in this category. Not that it made the most hardcore device. Or, for that matter, the most stylish one. But that it made wearables make sense to people who already had an iPhone. Which, in case you didn’t know, is quite a lot of people.

Today, most people buy the Apple Watch for three reasons: health and safety features, everyday convenience, and its integration with the iPhone. That sounds boring. And it is. But that’s exactly the point. While other brands are still trying to define what a wearable means, Apple has made the answer obvious. It’s the thing on your wrist that helps you out. It does it quietly, repeatedly and won’t ask you to become a different kind of person in return.

Apple’s marketing reflects that shift. The strongest Watch campaigns shy away from selling optimisation or positioning it as a wellness trophy. Instead, they sell outcomes. A fall detected. An irregular heartbeat flagged. An emergency call made at the right moment. There are real stories out there of the Apple Watch genuinely saving people’s lives.

And that is probably the smartest positioning move in the whole category. Because most people don’t want to become biohackers. They don’t want a lecture or another self-improvement regime strapped to their body. They want something that feels helpful, easy and normal.

Apple grasped that earlier than most. The “Close Your Rings” campaign works for the same reason. Instead of mythologising fitness, it normalises movement. The message is not to push harder: it’s to keep going. In many ways, it builds on a path Nike had already started with the FuelBand, one of the first lifestyle wearables to frame activity as part of everyday life rather than serious pro athlete stuff.

That accessibility is not a soft option. It’s the strategy. Apple has won by removing friction from the category. It made healthy behaviour feel familiar rather than aspirational, and built for habit before identity.

The ecosystem is a huge part of that. The Watch works seamlessly with the iPhone, AirPods, Fitness+, and Apple’s wider world of services. For iPhone users, adoption feels less like a decision and more like a next step. That’s a tough one for competitors to match.

The catch? Apple’s breadth comes at the expense of edge. For serious athletes, Garmin still feels more credible. For users who want something more discreet, Oura has more cultural appeal. Apple sits squarely in the middle of it all. For a mass adoption to happen, the world of wearable tech needs Apple to remain exactly where it is. The question is what happens to them once the mass adoption has happened.

Garmin: the data purist

Then there’s Garmin. The nerdy one of the lot. Whilst Apple emphasises accessibility and Oura sells a lifestyle, Garmin leans unapologetically into technical credibility. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was an accidental byproduct of the brand. But in actual fact, it is the brand.

The company’s heritage comes from GPS technology used in aviation, marine navigation and outdoor exploration, and that background shows up clearly in how Garmin approaches wearables. These devices feel less like gadgets and more like instruments. Models like the fēnix and Forerunner are effectively standard issue for marathon runners, triathletes and serious outdoor athletes. Battery life is long. Controls are physical. Displays are designed to remain readable in bright sunlight. Everything about the product communicates reliability over style.

Garmin’s long-running Beat Yesterday platform captures that mindset perfectly. Progress is measured in training data, not aesthetics. And there is a lot of data. Open a Garmin device and you’ll find an extraordinary depth of metrics: VO₂ max, training load, altitude acclimation, recovery time, route mapping. For casual users it can feel like overkill. For serious athletes, that’s exactly why it matters.

What Garmin understands better than most brands in the category is that for some users, friction is not always a flaw. Sometimes it’s proof. A denser interface, more numbers, more controls: it’s all evidence that this thing is built for people who actually care. Wrap a Garmin smartwatch round your wrist and you’re sending a signal to the world that you’re serious about fitness. In a market full of wearables trying to feel effortless, Garmin has held onto a harder-edged kind of credibility.

Unsurprisingly though, Garmin rarely feels culturally magnetic. The UI can be complex. The visual design leans firmly toward technical performance gear. Compared with Oura’s sleekness or Apple’s everyday ease, Garmin can feel a bit joyless. But that’s also why people trust it.

And that is a meaningful distinction. Because while other wearable brands are busy softening themselves for broader appeal, Garmin has stayed stubbornly legible to its core audience. The question is whether that clarity is enough to carry it further. There is obvious room for Garmin to improve usability, refinement and cultural presence. But the danger would be eroding the hardness that gives the brand its authority. Garmin matters because it feels like equipment. In other words, Garmin is not the wearable for everyone. That’s precisely why it still means something.

So there we go. But what happens now?

One thing we can be sure of is that more sensors, longer battery life and slicker colourways won’t define the next era of wearables. Category and value creation will. Which is a much harder job than launching a smartwatch in ‘Neo Mint’.

Right now, wearables live in an awkward in-between. They’re part medical device, part lifestyle accessory, part performance tool, part digital companion. The distance between Oura’s jewellery-like restraint, WHOOP’s intensity, Apple’s everydayness and Garmin’s data-first mindset shows how wide the playing field still is. It’s a category still being negotiated in public. There’s space to grow, but plenty of ways to faceplant.

Mass adoption won’t be won by early adopters alone. The real test is getting ordinary consumers to spend their hard-earned money, again and again, on something that still feels optional. Smartphones were optional in the beginning. Now it’s almost impossible to be part of the modern world without one. For wearables to succeed, they have to follow suit.

To get there, the category has to move past optimisation culture and into everyday usefulness. In practical terms, that means:

— Clear positioning that makes the value obvious in seconds
— Brands that feel culturally and emotionally relevant to a broader mix of people
— Experience design grounded in real user needs, with meaningful room for personalisation
— Less biomarker theatre in the marketing, more real behaviour change in the product
— Straight talk about limits and uncertainty
— Embedded partnerships that anchor devices in systems people already trust
— Pricing that feels earned through daily value, not future promise

The opportunity is huge. If these devices can genuinely close the gap between personal data and preventative care, they stop behaving like nice-to-have gadgets and start looking a lot more like infrastructure. And infrastructure does not run on innovation alone. It runs on trust that compounds over time.

That is why this is a brand problem. The technology is already there. That’s not the thing holding wearables back. The way they win is by doing what smartphones did before them: making themselves mean something beyond the product itself.

Until then, the category will remain what it is today: smart, promising, widely adopted, and still slightly unsure of itself.

Not done reading?

Good on you. To go deeper on all things related to brand strategy and wearable tech, here are a few of our book recommendations:

• “Our Future is Biotech” by Andrew Craig

• “The Brand Gap” by Marty Neumeier

• “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – The difference and why it matters” by Richard Rumelt

Let us know what you think

You’ve heard our point of view. Now we’d love to hear yours. Hit reply or comment, and don’t hold back:

• What’s your experience of wearables?

• What have we missed?

• What resonated with you the most?

• Any suggestions for our next newsletter?
  

See you in a few weeks for the next edition of OFF Brand. Let’s hope it’s smart.