Author: azeeadmin

These days my Instagram feed feels more like QVC than a social network.

And many of these companies are enjoying tremendous success pitching natural deodorants, unique underwear, creative candles, glam glasses, stunning shoes — all manner of well-crafted microbrands. We’re witnessing a cambrian explosion of new consumer startups.

For the last couple of years, building a successful startup has seemed as simple as picking an out of favor category like ketchup and turning the most mundane of condiments into a $100M+ exit! Why try to build a robot or AI company when you can just modify and repackage a topping?

But how should founders evaluate the markets for mattresses and men’s health? What heuristics should an investor use to weigh Hims and Hubble, or to compare AllBirds and Away? And what is the right kind of founder for this sort of startup? Do you look for the designer with an unimpeachable aesthetic sense? Or an MBA who’s run the numbers on every facet of the fashion industry?

It’s far from clear at this point, but I think there are a few emerging ground rules:

It’s more Science than Art

What strikes me as most unusual and unpredictable is that most of these companies were founded by entrepreneurs with analytical, business training. They’re strong on finance, marketing, and customer acquisition. It’s not what you would have expected in categories noted more for an ineffable “cool” factor than feature lists. Creative design helps a brand stand out, but accounting acumen is what keeps it alive and on its way to becoming a unicorn.

It turns out that much of the same playbook for building and scaling a software company applies to a modern CPG startup. In many ways, Casper isn’t so different from Slack, and they are certainly closer in spirit than a direct competitor like MattressFirm.

This is why you see a migration of founders and VCs like me playing in categories previously out of bounds for tech investors. Whether its finding the latest targeting tools or closely monitoring customer NPS, this is the DNA needed to be successful. For this reason, VCs are able to pattern match, somewhat, based on what they’ve seen working in other aspects of their investing.

Market structure is more important than marketing

Bootstrapped mattress maker Tuft & Needle merged with market leader Serta-Sealy for somewhere between $200 million and $800 million. Purple, who only raised $2 million via crowdfunding, was acquired for $1.1 billion by a private equity company. Casper is reported to have broken through the $600 million in revenue milestone earlier this year and is on the trajectory towards becoming a public company. These mattress companies, along with other emerging D2C players have captured 20% of the market in the space of five years.  

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that three amazing founding teams bet on beds, but I’d wager the state of the mattress market is partially responsible for their success. The mattress business is essentially a duopoly run by private equity firms who have made major investments in real-estate and an in-store sales model. As a result, we see less experimentation and artificially high prices.

Compare the mattress industry to the meal kit delivery business which had to contend with a wide variety of substitute food products, from Domino’s to DoorDash and supermarkets to Soylent — not to mention spoilage, high levels of customer churn, etc. As a result, companies in this space have had a harder time dominating their respective categories. Sadly, there is no amount of clever branding or subway advertising that will eliminate those realities.

What’s the million-dollar insight?

The first Casper mattress was the 50,001st mattress sold by Philip Krim. Prior to manufacturing his own beds, Krim built a drop ship business serving other manufacturers and learned which levers to pull in order to attract customers and generate demand. It was this seemingly mundane insight – that you could box and ship a mattress via a carrier instead of onboard a large truck that allowed him to scale much faster than Sleepys and generate $100M+ in sales just a couple of years after founding.

Similarly, ButcherBox and Daily Harvest each ignited a boom in direct-to-consumer food delivery. These companies recognized that fresh and immediately frozen products limit spoilage and allows for much easier transport. While competitors had to worry about organic kale rotting in a fulfillment center, these companies could focus more attention on customer acquisition. This insight coupled with smart marketing, virality, and high NPS has helped them both garner millions of dollars of weekly sales.

It’s not nearly enough to say, “The competitors don’t get it.” or this is for “Gen Z.” Instead, like with all start-ups, the founders need to identify that non-obvious, often contrarian, insight. This is usually less of a product “A-Ha!” and is more likely an arbitrage opportunity in a dysfunctional market.

Spend Carefully, Your Potential Buyer Will

Digital vertical native brands can be compelling investments, but they are unlikely to have deal dimensions, in terms of multiples or absolute exits, that we see with traditional tech investments.

Just look at a few recent sales of DNVBs. The absolute dollar amounts are reasonable, but the multiples are small relative to tech, ranging from 1.6X to a potential 8X (no doubt subject to earn outs), with the average being in the 2-3X range. On the bright side, these acquisitions do tend to consummate quickly, often within a few years of their founding.

If you finance a DNVB like a deep tech company with heavy reliance on tens of millions of venture capital, founders and investors are likely to see little in return. As Jason Del Ray recently wrote at ReCode, many of these brands are skipping VC all together.

• Sir Kensington was acquired for $143M

• Native Deodorant was acquired for $100M

• MVMT was acquired for $100M

• Tuft and Needle had $170M in revenue and was acquired for 1-5X

• Krave Jerky sold for $200-$300M with $35M in revenue

• RX Bar was acquired for $600M, but had $130M in sales

• Dave’s Killer Bread was acquired for $275M on $160M in sales

• Anova was acquired for $115M (with $135M in earn out potential) on $40M in sales.

• Blue Apron has built the biggest brand in meal kit delivery, got public, and currently has a market cap that is just 50% higher the aggregate amount of capital it has raised.

• StitchFix is one of the clearest success stories and still trades at 1-3X revenues.

• Dollar Shave Club sold for $1B on $200M in revenue, though it wasn’t yet profitable.

It’s important to remember that these sales are predicated on impressive revenues. Cruise Automation can get acquired for $1B because its technology could be the basis for a new kind of car, but don’t expect Kellogg’s to acquire a pre-launch cereal company for a similar sum.

DNVB investing is here to stay as there is a fundamental shift going on in retail and how consumers shop. Unless you’re Kylie Jenner with a hit reality show, investors would be wise not to dismiss that nerdy MBA or former consultant pitching the next great brand.

The most remarkable thing about the iPhone XS Max is that it doesn’t feel huge. It’s all relative, of course. And surely Apple’s old guard would have scoffed at the notion of a 6.5-inch display. But time marches on. Seasons change and so do minds. Temperatures increase, superhero movies pile up and screen sizes increase, unabated.

Much of the perception no doubt comes from the rest of the industry pushing the limits of human hands and pants pockets. I’ve been carrying around the Note 9 of late — and before that, the iPhone 8 Plus. The XS Max feels roughly the size of the latter, which is pretty remarkable given that the Plus sported a 5.5 inch display.

The dimensions break down thusly:

iPhone 8 Plus: 158.4 x 78.1 x 7.5 mm

iPhone Xs Max: 157.5 x 77.4 x 7.7 mm

The Max is ever-so-slightly smaller in two of three dimensions.

This was accomplished in no small part to bezels. Getting rid of all of that extra real estate makes a world of difference, along with dropping the home button and continuing to embrace the way of the notch.

Aside from size, you won’t notice a lot new here. That’s just sort of the plight of the S model —well, that and coming immediately after the largest single design update in the iPhone’s 10 year history. The new finishes are very, very shiny as well, silver especially, which will probably blind you if the sun catches it just right, but you’re going to put that $1,099+ phone in a case anyway, right?

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Speaking of pricing, as Tim Cook said on stage, the larger model starts at “just” $100 more than its predecessor. That’s the sort of statement you can get away with when you help set the precedent for a $1,000 phone a year prior. That Band-Aid has already been ripped off, right, so what’s another $100 between friends?

That said, if I were in the market for a new iPhone, I’d strongly consider the size upgrade. The leap from 5.8 to 6.5 inches is pretty sizable. Sticking with the former was an interesting move on Apple’s part, given that the XR splits the difference at 6.1 inches. Maybe it’s a supply chain thing? I don’t know. I’m just sort of spitballing at this point.

As ever, I’m going to have to hold off judgement on things like performance and camera quality until we can take the thing for a spin. Given that the phones are due out in the not-so-distant future, however, I suspect that will be sooner rather than later.

It’s worth noting, of course, that those bits and bobs are relatively iterative, as is custom with the “s” suffix. The specs also look remarkably similar between the XS and XS Max: dual rear-facing 12-megapixel cameras, A12 Bionic chip, HDR display (though the Max naturally, has more pixels, while both work out to 458 PPI). I suspect this decision was made, in part, to help keep the newer, bigger phone at “just” $100 over its predecessor.

Snapchat’s sagging share price is making it tough to retain talent. Bobby Lo, founder and CEO of mobile search app Vurb that Snap Inc acquired for $114.5 million two years ago is leaving day-to-day operations at the company. That means Lo cut out early on his four-year retention package vesting schedule, which was likely influenced by Snapchat falling to new share price lows. Snap is trading around $9.15 today, compared to its $17 IPO price and $24 first-day close.

That’s down over 7 percent from yesterday following BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield gave Snap a sell rating with a target price of $5 saying “We are tired of Snapchat’s excuses for missing numbers and are no longer willing to give management ‘time’ to figure out monetization.” Greenfield is known as one of the top social network analysts, so people take him seriously when he says “We have been disappointed in SNAP’s product evolution (as have users) and see no reason to believe this will change.”

Vurb is a good example of this. The app let users make plans with friends to visit local places, allowing them to bundle restaurants, movie theaters, and more into shareable decks of search cards. It took over a year after the October 2016 acquisition for the tech to be integrated into Snapchat in the form of context cards in search. But Snap never seemed to figure out how to make its content-craving teen audience care about Vurb’s utility. Snap could have built powerful offline meetup tools out of the cards but never did, and lackluster Snap Map adoption furthered clouded the company’s path forward around local businesses.

Now Lo tells TechCrunch of his departure, “Building experiences at Snap has been a wonderful culmination of my seven-year startup journey with Vurb. My transition to an advisor at Snap lets me continue supporting the amazing people there while directing my time back into startups, starting with investing and advising in founders.”

Lo was early to embrace the monolithic app style pioneered by WeChat in China that’s become increasingly influential in the states. Snap confirmed the departure while trying to downplay it. A spokesperson tells me, “Bobby transitioned to an advisory role this summer, and we appreciate his continued contributions to Snap.”

Given Snap is known to back-weight its stock vesting schedules, Lo could be leaving over half of his retention shares on the table. That decision should worry investors. As a solo founder, Lo already made off with a big chunk of the acquisition price that including $21 million in cash and $83 million in stock, so with the company’s share price so low, he might have had little incentive to stay.

 

Since last July, Snap has lost a ton of talent including SVP of Engineering Tim Sehn, early employee Chloe Drimal, VP of HR and Legal Robyn Thomas and VP of Securities and Facilities Martin Lev, CFO Drew Vollero, VP of product Tom Conrad, TimeHop co-founder Jonathan Wegener, Spectacles team lead Mark Randall, ad tech manager Sriram Krishnan, head of sales Jeff Lucas, and just last week, its COO Imran Khan.

With its user count shrinking, constant competition from Facebook and Instagram, and talent fleeing, it’s hard to see a bright future for Snap. Unless CEO Evan Spiegel, without the help of his departed lieutenants, can come up with a groundbreaking new product that’s not easy to copy, we could be looking at downward spiral for the ephemeral app. At what point must Snap consider selling itself to Google, Apple, Tencent, Disney, or whoever will take on the distressed social network?

Apple announced a whole bunch of new products today at its fancy Cupertino campus in what was its first hardware event since becoming a $1 trillion company. The company proudly unveiled the iPhone XS, the iPhone XS Max, the Apple Watch Series 4 and more.

The stock market behaved as we expected. Apple’s stock spent much of the day hovering down 1 percent, dropping as low as 2 percent at the conclusion of the big presentation. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) recovered by the time the markets closed, ending the day, again, down about 1.2 percent. Exciting stuff, I know.

As we’ve said before, the stock price doesn’t typically do all that much during hardware spectacles like this. Despite the amount of fanfare leading up to these big presentations, as was the case preceding the iPhone X announcement, Wall Street doesn’t overreact. Why? Because they’ve seen it all before and like many of our loyal readers, they know what’s coming. Plus, all the press leading up to the event usually takes away any opportunity for a true surprise. Leaks, too, eliminate the shock factor.

A few of Apple’s competitors’ stocks, however, tumbled on the news of its new lineup of iPhones and its latest Apple Watch.

Fitbit tanks

Fitbit’s (NYSE: FIT) stock took the hardest hit on Wednesday as Apple announced its newest smartwatch, the Apple Watch Series 4. Fitbit, the creator of a competing wearable health and fitness device, closed down nearly 7 percent.

Samsung, another one of Apple’s competitors, was down just 1 percent on the news of Apple’s new fancy-schmancy phones.

The iPhone XS, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, is the best and greatest phone the company has ever made. And they’ll be the industry’s first smartphones to be powered by 7nm chips.

U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: QCOM) stock dipped 2 percent on that news. Apple and Qualcomm have been going head-to-head in a long-running patent war. Apple, as a result, has been working to remove Qualcomm equipment from its phones.

Samsung and Qualcomm closed down about 1 percent Wednesday.

A strong year for Apple

Apple’s stock is up more than 30 percent so far this year. The company shipped some 41 million phones in Q2 2018, per Canalys (via email), and has continued to disclose positive earnings in its lead-up to the big $1 trillion. Apple beat analyst expectations when it reported $53.3 billion in revenue in its latest earnings report, up 17 percent year-over-year.

The company’s stock took a slight hit earlier this week after President Trump tweeted that Apple’s prices may climb due to China tariffs.

The tweet was a response to a letter Apple wrote to the Trump administration warning them that tariffs may increase the cost of its products, including the Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePods.

“It is difficult to see how tariffs that hurt U.S. companies and U.S. consumers will advance the Government’s objectives with respect to China’s technology policies,” Apple wrote, per CNBC. “We hope, instead, that you will reconsider these measures and work to find other, more effective solutions that leave the U.S. economy and U.S. consumer stronger and healthier than ever before.”

If you missed today’s event or you’re already ready to relive it (no judgment), we live-blogged the whole thing here. Catch up on all the new hardware here.

Apple is under the impression that its “courage” has already paid off and that it no longer needs to ship a headphone dongle with its new phones. Mission accomplished!

The new iPhone XS and XR models will not include the Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter, and users will have to buy it separately for $9. The iPhone 8 will also not include the dongle moving forward, The Verge reported.

On the bright side, the dongle is only $9, and if you’ve been an iPhone owner for the past few years, you’ve got one already.

To be clear, a lot of phones have been moving in the headphone jack-less direction and including the dongles with its past models was a nice precedent set by Apple. That said, the Pixel 2 included the dongle, so Apple is again leading the way here with an unpopular move.

XS is the normal one. XR is the cheap one. XS Max is the big one. That’s a good start to understanding Apple’s confusing naming scheme for its new line of iPhones. Apparently jealous of Android’s fragmentation, Apple decided it needed three different models, three different storage sizes, and nine different colors.

You can think of the XS as the updated iPhone X, the Max as the new Plus, and the XR as a revival of the great-for-kids budget iPhone SE. Here’s a comparison of their features, prices, options, and release dates.

 

The iPhone XS – Standard, Smaller, Sooner

Apple’s new flagship phone is the iPhone XS. If you want the best Apple has to offer that will still fit in your pocket, this is the one for you. It’s got a 5.8-inch diagonal OLED “Super Retina” HDR screen with 458 pixels per inch, which is actually taller than the old 8 Plus’s 5.5-inch screen, but it’s a little thinner so it has less total screen volume. Dual 12 megapixel cameras offer stabilization and 2X optical zoom plus the new depth control Portrait mode feature. It’s $999 for the 64GB, $1,149 for the 256GB, or $1,349 for the 512GB. It comes in silver, gold and space gray, all in stainless steel that’s waterproof to 2 meters. Pre-orders start this Friday September 14th, and they ship and hit stores on September 21st.

The iPhone XS Max – Bigger Screen, Bigger Price

If you love watching movies, browsing photos, and shooting videos on your phone, you’ll want the iPhone XS Max. The 6.5-inch OLED “Super Retina” HDR screen is the biggest ever on an iPhone, dwarfing the 8 Plus’s screen yet with a similar device size since the XS Max takes up more of the phone’s face. The twin 12 megapixel lenses stabilize your images and offer 2X optical zoom as well as Portrait mode depth control. It too comes in stainless steel silver, gold and space gray that are all waterproof to 2 meters, and costs $100 more than the XS at $1,099 for 64GB, $1,249 for 256GB, or a whopping $1,449 for 512GB. As with the XS, pre-orders start Friday September 14th, and you can get it in your hands on September 21st.

The iPhone XR – Colorful, Cheaper, Duller

Don’t need the sharpest or biggest new screen and want to save some cash? Grab an iPhone XR.  It’s size comes in between the XS and XS Max with a 6.1-inch diagonal LCD “Liquid Retina” screen with 326 pixels per square inch. Fewer pixels and no HDR display means the XR won’t look quite as brilliant as the XS models. The XR also only has one 12 megapixel camera lens so it doesn’t offer stabilization or 2X optical zoom like its XS siblings, but it still gets the cool Bokeh-changing Portrait mode depth control. The XR is only waterproof to one meter instead of two likes its expensive sisters, and lacks 3D Touch for quick access to deeper features.

As a bonus with the XR, you do get is 1.5 hours of additional battery life and six color options in the alumninum (“aloominium” if you’re Jonny Ive) finish: white, black, blue, yellow, coral and red. And it’s cheaper at $749 for 64GB, with $799 for 128GB and $899 for 256GB. If that’s not cheap enough, you can now get the iPhone 7 for $449 and the iPhone 8 costs $599 — though there are no more iPhones with headphone jacks now that the 6S and SE are getting retired. In hopes that you’ll buy a pricier one, the XR arrives a month later than the XS models, with pre-orders on October 19th and it shipping October 26th.

Apple may find this level of customization lets everyone find the right iPhone for them, though it could simultaneously produce decision paralysis in buyers who aren’t confident enough to pay. While it’s a headache at first, you’ll end up with a phone fit for your style and budget. Though without a ton of improvements over the iPhone X, you might not need an “iPhone Excess”.

HQ Trivia is aiming to attract more players following a slight decline in downloads with a new, large prize. The company announced today it has bagged Target to sponsor to sponsor a special Emmy-themed game featuring its biggest-ever single winner prize of $100,000. The game will air on Monday, September 17 at 9 PM ET, but will be played in a different fashion than usual.

Typically, HQ Trivia players compete to win or split a cash prize, which often doesn’t amount to much more than enough for a cup of coffee. But this time around, HQ Trivia will run in a “one winner takes all” format, meaning only one individual will earn the winnings from the game.

Instead of a normal 12-question round with 10 second to answer, the game will continue until only one winner remains. Players can still use their extra lives, but only until question number 15. After that, they won’t work.

The game’s content will be Emmy Awards-themed, featuring questions about shows, actors, the Emmy telecast, and other historical facts.

Target is stepping up as the game’s sponsor for this winner-takes-all milestone game. The game itself will also be branded, but the exact nature of the creative is something Target is keeping under wraps for the time being as it’s a first for the retailer.

HQ Trivia has worked with a number of other big-name brands in the past through its game, including Warner Bros, Nike, MillerCoors, National Geographic, Chase, Viacom, and NBCUniversal.

The news of the milestone game comes at a time when HQ Trivia’s downloads have been trending slightly downwards. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reported last month for the app’s Apple TV launch, the iOS version of HQ Trivia had fallen from being the No. 1 U.S. trivia game to No. 10, and the No. 44 game to No. 196.

Today, it’s the No. 135 game and No. 467 Overall app.

According to data from Sensor Tower, the app has 12.8 million downloads across platforms, the majority of which (11M) were this year.

HQ Trivia claims the app continues to have the “largest live audience on mobile daily.”

The company responded at the time that games are a “hits business” and “don’t grow exponentially forever.” Rus Yusupov, CEO of HQ Trivia parent company Intermedia Labs, also noted that HQ was working on new game formats as a result.

Despite the fickle nature of mobile gamers, HQ Trivia has spawned a number of clones and other live games, including Fox’s FN Genius, ProveIt, FameGame, Gravy, MajorityRules, Cash Show, and many others. Even Facebook caught onto the trend, launching its own gameshows platform to support interactive video.

However, it remains to be seen if live game-playing is a lasting interest for mobile gamers, or just a flash in the pan.

Apple kicked off its hardware event today with a charming little video that did double promo duty, both introducing the event in a lighthearted way and giving a quick curated tour of the company’s new “spaceship” headquarters. We don’t always post Apple advertisements here at TechCrunch, but when we do, it’s because they actually show off something new. Well, kind of new, anyway. It’s nice to see it all in motion.

A low aerial shot brings us into the scene, the top floor of the spaceship’s exterior, and as the opening strains of the “Mission: Impossible” theme start up, we see our protagonist (Alison, we find out later) blast out of a conference room.

A couple of things to note here: the top floor (4, by the way) is filled with outward-facing rooms, surely of various sizes and functions, but the outermost ring, right next to the windows, is where you walk. With all the people moving around those glass-lined tunnels, perhaps a better name for this HQ would be the Ant Farm.

However there do appear to be some shared spaces with chairs and other accommodations here and there. It just doesn’t appear that lots of the outdoor spots will be cherry offices with nice views, with peons stuck in some inner ring. That’s good. But there will have to be a full time staff, plus robots, to keep the glass clean. That’s bad. It’s poetic in a way, though: everyone is always having to de-smudge their phones, why shouldn’t Apple have to de-smudge its headquarters?

Next (via a rather dizzying pan) is what we have to assume is a spoke on the wheel, a large atrium that looks to extend from center to exterior, and is filled with calming white and neutral-colored furniture. It looks like the inside of Jony Ives’s brain. There are probably eight of these, with one or two being extra resplendent for visitors, perhaps with stores extending off the sides, portrait galleries of Apple execs, and so on.

This shot is very “North by Northwest,” by the way.

The spoke opens up on the inner side onto the big courtyard, as we all know, which is elaborately landscaped and criss-crossed with paths. At the center is a large pond, though interestingly there seem to be rather few paths leading to it, since our heroine takes the direct route through the sage and other brush.

I actually expected the pond to be a bit more picturesque, but there’s only so much you can do with that climate. It seems to be only about a foot deep, lined with large rocks. I was hoping they might let it go wild with lily pads, wild birds and so on. I’ll be interested to see how they keep it free of algae so people like the protagonist can rush through it. Luckily her Airpods didn’t fall out. (If she had a headphone cable it wouldn’t be a problem. Just saying.)

Obviously Apple is making a bit of fun of itself here regarding the inconvenient nature of a ring-shaped HQ with a body of water in the middle. Shouldn’t there be a pedestrian underpass or something?

Across the pond our intrepid briefcase carrier perhaps unadvisedly runs right through a bunch of people blowing grass all over each other on what appears to be a large continuous greenbelt or fairway between the lake and the ring. Doesn’t Apple know you’re supposed to leave the cuttings on the grass? What do those guys think they’re doing anyway? There are like 20 in one little area.

Into the far side of the ring, where there’s a large cafeteria filled with Apple’s favorite cedar furniture and stretching through all 4 stories. Some of it looks CG. If I’m honest a lot of this looks CG. It has probably been extensively touched up.

On the outside of the cafeteria spoke is a huge set of sliding doors, which employees are likely not encouraged to do a tactical roll through when they’re closing. That’ll be really nice in the mild summers of Cupertino to get the breeze in there. That space might be hard to heat if there’s a cold snap, though.

A nice touch has the protagonist hitting all her rings while taking a silver Apple bike from HQ to Steve Jobs Theater. Brave of Apple to show the bike failing, or grabbing her cuff, or whatever happens at the end. Usually nothing of theirs fails in their promos.

Of course the denouement is the delivery of the briefcase to Tim, and the reveal — with a shot that will probably be used and reused for dank memes in the future — that it was The Clicker.

Check out the full short film here:

Clearly Apple wanted to show off its new HQ in a careful way, and certainly they’ve whetted the appetites of many Apple devotees who will want to see this haven in person. Unfortunately, however, our heroine has tasted the bitterness of being carelessly exploited by the executives at her company, perhaps now feeling for the first time what Apple’s manufacturing partners exact from their workers. With luck she will learn from this and enact change from within. Now that’s an impossible mission.

With a full year since its last mention onstage at Apple’s last hardware event, Apple’s AirPower wireless charger mat is still missing.

At the company’s iPhone event this morning in Cupertino, there was little mention of the wireless charging tech present in the new iPhones, but more surprisingly there was not a single word said about the company’s AirPower wireless charging mat that it teased last year as coming in “early” 2018.

Apple even had early AirPower mat samples in the hands-on area of the hardware event last year but it seems delays have left the device out of this year’s show and pushed further down the product roadmap. While Apple’s website did not show any details on the AirPower charger, there were details present still about a wireless charging case for the AirPods “coming in 2018” that is designed for the mat.

What’s the problem and why the big delay here?

Well new charging tech is a major liability for any tech company and Apple has been trying some ground-breaking things with the AirPower charger that definitely seems more complex than just sticking three Qi charger coils into a padded mat and calling it a day.

First off, the big deal about AirPower is that it is an evolution of the Qi charger standard, (at least some of) the coils have to be smaller to work with the Apple Watch and new AirPods case, and the pad also has to be capable of delivering a roughly full speed charge to the phone, something that is likely a major engineering stress test for thermals.

What may have been the biggest challenge as a result is that Apple wants you to be able to charge three devices simultaneously without you having to worry about where they are on the pad. That means that unlike today’s Qi chargers where you have to scoot your phone around to nudge into a position where it can charge, you truly should be able to just drop something on the pad and get to charging. Some of these issues were detailed in a report from Bloomberg earlier this summer.

In past years, Apple had some issues with shipping both the AirPods and HomePod within the time horizon they had detailer earlier, but Apple gave an awful lot of details about this product in its tease last year and it’s peculiar that it didn’t even get an offhand mention at WWDC or today’s event.

While one of Apple’s hardware devices shipping with a buggy version of iOS might lead to some late night patches and customers unable to open an app, dealing with power management flaws is a liability cornucopia. If anything is seriously wrong or the wireless charging mat were to make a mistake detecting a device the paired devices could theoretically catch fire.

Given the challenges it might make sense that Apple has been a little more careful with this one in the testing phase, but it’s also possible the issues haven’t been with design and are instead just with scaling manufacturing. We don’t really know because Apple hasn’t said squat, instead they chose to announce the device last year, perhaps before they had an accurate scope of the issues left to tackle before shipping it.

Apple today introduced a set of new Apple Watch bands to accompany the Apple Watch Series 4, announced this morning at the company’s hardware event in Cupertino. The bands, which will debut this fall with the Series 4 devices, will also fit older generation watches, Apple says. They include new collections designed for Apple Watch Nike+ as well as the Apple Watch Hermès Series 4 edition, which combines handcrafted leather bands and exclusive watch faces.

In the Nike+ lineup, Apple will add new band colors to match the updated Nike watch faces. This collection will include a Pure Platinum/Black Sport Band and a Summit White Sport Loop with reflective yarn.

The Hermès collection, meanwhile, will introduce color-blocked bands to match watch faces that shift from one color to the next with the passage of the minute hand.

Among the new bands are the Indigo/Craie/Orange Swift Leather Double Tour and the Bordeaux/Rose Extrême/Rose Azalée Swift Leather Double Tour ($489), both of which wrap around the wrist twice and are handmade in France using Barenia leather, textured Epsom leather, or supple Swift leather.

These same bands are also available in Single Tour styles ($339) – meaning they only wrap around the wrist once.

There’s also a new Fauve Grained Barenia Leather Single Tour Rallye ($439) style available.

In total, there are five new Hermès bands, most of which are designed to match the new Hermès watch faces. As you get used to the movement of colors across the watch screen, you may be able to tell the time without having to peer the hour and minute hands – the placement of the colors themselves could be enough.

The Hermès bands will go on sale on Friday, September 14 on the Apple Store app in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, U.K. and U.S.

The Nike+ bands will be more broadly available, starting Friday, October 5, in Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guam, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Macau, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, U.K. and U.S.

They’ll also later be available on the Hermès website.