Silicone watch band on a wrist, tapping an RFID reader. The physical product in its natural context. If available: the beta nylon bands with sewn RFID pouches alongside.
fobbr
I don't carry my elevator keys anymore and wear my watch every day.
My Role
Co-founder and sole designer-researcher. Product vision, industrial design, user research methodology, pricing strategy, brand identity. Co-founded with Carl Demolder (ME, Georgia Tech — now at Apple Hardware Engineering).
Hardware
Product type
Co-founder
Role
2 years
Duration
Create-X
Incubator
“Your wrist already tracks your heart rate, unlocks your car, and sends messages — but to get into your apartment, you're still fumbling for a plastic fob in your pocket. 36% of the commercial RFID market still runs on 1990s technology.”
Key Design Decisions
The moments that shaped the product.
Photo grid: the broken silicone mold, the nylon band material, the sewn RFID pouch, the finished beta band. The physical craft of making 40 prototypes by hand.
40 hand-made beta bands when the molds broke
The original silicone molds broke. Rather than delay the user study, I pivoted to premade nylon bands and sewed RFID chip pouches into each one by hand. Cut the pouches, sewed in the chips, photographed everything. Research commitment over research convenience — ship the study anyway.
Van Westendorp pricing chart with the four curves (too cheap, cheap, expensive, too expensive) intersecting. Annotated with the acceptable price range and the surprise finding about endowment effect.
Van Westendorp over conjoint for a product nobody's seen
For pricing a category-creating product, there's no reference price. Conjoint assumes known alternatives. Van Westendorp finds the price range from scratch. Results: fluoroelastomer bands priced at $11–$54 — lower than our $50 assumption, likely due to endowment effect from the free beta band.
Timeline of the week-long study showing touchpoints: Day 1 (setup + Calendly), Day 2-3 (journaling prompts), Day 5 (mid-study survey via Qualtrics), Day 7 (final USE survey + Van Westendorp). The automated research pipeline visualized.
Progressive disclosure study over a week-long journal
Rather than front-loading all questions in a post-use survey, the study revealed prompts gradually over a week. Participants journaled about where they used the band, what context, what behaviors changed, and how it felt. This produced richer qualitative data than a single survey ever could.
Microscopy images of thorny devil hexagonal skin → abstracted hexagonal pattern → final brand identity application. The research-to-design pipeline for a visual identity.
Bio-inspired brand from thorny devil microscopy
The brand identity (Jester + Magician archetypes) includes a hexagonal pattern derived from studying thorny devil lizard skin at 200μm/500μm microscope scale. Material research driving visual identity — not decoration, but design grounded in the physical world the product inhabits.
Process
Proxmark 3 RFID analysis. Mapped fragmented tag formats.
Silicone molds, then hand-sewn nylon bands. 40 beta units.
Week-long progressive disclosure study. USE + Van Westendorp + journaling.
Won Convergence Innovation Competition. Graduated Create-X.
What Shipped
87.3%
Usefulness (USE)
96.5%
Ease of Learning
46.2
NPS
40
Hand-made bands
USE Survey scores all A-grade on the SUS benchmark. Won the Convergence Innovation Competition (golden ticket into Create-X). Graduated from Georgia Tech's startup incubator. Carl is now at Apple Hardware Engineering.
- USE Survey: Usefulness 87.3%, Satisfaction 85.8%, Ease of Learning 96.5% — all A-grade SUS
- NPS: 46.2% (53.8% promoters, 7.7% detractors)
- Won the Convergence Innovation Competition
- Graduated from Georgia Tech's Create-X startup incubator
What I Learned
Carl and I started this in a dorm room, and he's now at Apple Hardware Engineering. The company didn't survive, but the thinking did. fobbr taught me that the hardest design problems aren't visual — they're structural. How do you price something nobody's seen? How do you study a behavior that doesn't exist yet?
Signals for Recruiters