fobbr

Watch someone reach their apartment gate: coffee in one hand, phone in the other, a bag on the shoulder — and the fob for the door buried in a pocket they can't get to.

I started fobbr with Carl Demolder by watching that moment repeat: hands full at the gate, the fob misplaced again, the jog with nowhere good to carry a key. The pain was never dramatic. It was constant, low-grade, and everywhere — the kind of friction people stop noticing because they've decided it's just how doors work.

Annoyance alone doesn't justify a product, so I went looking for whether the gap was structural. It was. Thirty-six percent of the commercial RFID access market still runs on low-frequency technology from the 1990s. The hardware works just well enough that nobody upgrades — and when facilities managers were asked why they hadn't, the number-one reason wasn't security or capability. It was cost. Inertia, priced in.

The user side was just as fragmented. Most people don't carry one credential — they carry several: the apartment fob, the office badge, the gym tag, each issued by a different building, with no way to combine them. Line those up beside the readers they open and you find no standard, no compatibility, no design — a junk drawer of incompatible plastic. That fragmentation was the opening.

I started from the ideal experience: access that simply happens — hands-free, and fast enough that you never break stride to dig for a fob, peel off a glove, or set down the dog's leash.

From that ideal, three questions followed: what this user values, which real-world groups live that way, and how big the market underneath them actually is.

The core question wasn't "do people like it" — it was "does the band change behavior," and behavior change can't be measured in a single session. So instead of cramming every question into one end-of-study survey, I built a study that revealed prompts gradually over seven days. Participants journaled about where they used the band, what context changed, what habits shifted, and how it felt as the week went on.

Running that took more than good questions; it took operations. I automated the whole pipeline — Calendly scheduling, a Jotform consent flow, automated Qualtrics journal prompts, and a closing USE survey, NPS, and Van Westendorp pricing study (with Mann-Whitney testing on the results) — so 27 participants could move through a rigorous protocol without it collapsing into chaos. A week-long diary study is harder to run than a survey, and it's the right instrument when the question is whether a habit forms.

The plan was injection-molded silicone. The molds didn't survive — and waiting on new tooling would have blown the study timeline. So I bought blank nylon bands and hand-sewed RFID chips into each one — two per band, aligned to the left and right of the wrist. Forty units built, twenty-seven into the study. Cut, stitched, and photographed on a folding table.

This isn't a story about resourcefulness as a personality trait. It's a research decision: the study design mattered more than the manufacturing process — and a hand-sewn band answers “does behavior change” exactly as well as a molded one.

By the end of the week, the journals had turned from novelty to habit. People weren't describing a gadget; they were describing a changed routine — lighter pockets, one less thing to lose, the gym and the gate and the front door all handled from the wrist.

Pricing should have been the easy part. It wasn't, because the standard tool didn't apply. Conjoint analysis works by trading features against known alternatives — and fobbr had none. It was pricing a category that didn't exist.

So I used Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter, which builds an acceptable price range from scratch — four questions about price perception, read from where the cumulative curves cross rather than from an average. Conjoint would have produced confident, wrong numbers; Van Westendorp produced honest ranges for both materials.

The sharpest finding was a bias, not a number. Most testers said the fluoroelastomer was the band they actually wanted — yet they priced the woven higher, because they'd worn the woven beta band all week and the endowment effect inflates whatever you already own. So I trusted the fluoroelastomer's $15–$35 as the truer signal of willingness to pay, and discounted the woven's premium.

fobbr's identity is playful and a little wry, sitting on a quieter promise: the kind of thing that just works — and surprises you with how seamless it is. The system underneath is small and consistent: the hexagonal fr monogram, a palette of fobbr green (#1F8566) with a mid grey, a light grey, and plenty of white, and a warm, plain-spoken voice.

What shipped from two years of research and iteration was a complete product, not a prototype: a fluoroelastomer band in nine colorways, the RFID built in rather than bolted on, photographed and merchandised as if it were already on a store wall.