Plenty of Tech Accessories Look Good. This One Hasn't Dated in 10 Years | 100 People With Ideas

How did they do it?

Native Union was founded in 2009 by two foreign designers living in Hong Kong, John Brunner and Igor Duc, and makes phone accessories.

But this brand — which set out to make tech accessories and said it did not want "over design" to blur the user's role — went on to appear again and again in the design press, taking home professional awards including the Red Dot Award, the German Design Award and the Good Design Award, and winning a large following among design enthusiasts.

Native Union's products are regulars on the lists design and lifestyle magazines run under headings like "minimalist design brings order to life" and "recommended finds."

In a world now dominated by smartphones, founders Igor Duc and John Brunner think many tech accessory companies still can't find the right balance between function and style. Most of the industry makes products on purely utilitarian terms: dull materials, no attention to detail, and one goal — beating rivals on price.

Nine years ago they saw an opening. First, smart mobile devices were getting smaller, lighter, thinner and more fragile, and people handled them so often that protection mattered more. Second, most products on the market had no personality and looked alike, which created demand for something individual.

That was the idea behind Native Union: balance performance with elegance, and bring the design thinking of lifestyle brands into tech accessories.

Ten years ago, Igor Duc, a Frenchman, and John Brunner, a Briton, met in a shared office in Hong Kong. Both came out of design, and both were keen on tech products. Duc ran a furniture design company; Brunner worked at an industrial design firm founded in London.

Both worried about how far large, heavy goods like furniture could travel internationally, and they talked about "over-design" in their field — the sense that products with too much visible design feel unreal.

They hit it off, and began talking about the tech industry, where neither had ever worked. Driven by their interest in tech products, they gradually mapped out Native Union: minimalist design that would give people accessories at once humane, stylish, useful and good to hold.

"We live with our mobile devices all the time, but we were frustrated by the quality of their accessories, especially mass-produced plastic charging cables," Igor Duc said. "Look at the design of Apple's products — there's a big gap between that and the accessories made to support them. You touch your phone about 300 times a day, so it seems logical to make that experience better."

The risky-looking start did run into trouble. John Brunner recalls that in Native Union's early days he spent too much time on small daily problems and too little on the company's overall strategy. Without that wider view, the company struggled to grow evenly.

They then brought in the French industrial designer Fabien Nauroy to run the design team. Nauroy had been a product designer at the French electronics maker SAGEM and at Taiwan's Acer, then design director at Kokido, a Hong Kong pool equipment company.

As soon as he arrived, Nauroy set a minimalist style for Native Union's products that was easy to recognize, stripping out as much redundant detail as possible. The team held to three principles: watch the user experience, push material innovation, and mind the details.

More important, he built a stable, entirely in-house design team. That gave the products a consistency that reinforced the brand's tone and brought a run of awards — Red Dot, German Design, Good Design — along with a good name in the industry.

Nauroy says Braun's products from the Dieter Rams era moved him. He likes products that keep only basic, simple forms, put function first, and hold on to small details of texture and material.

As he sees it, Fuseproject — the world-class firm led by the industrial designer Yves Behar — and Jony Ive's design team at Apple reshaped the consumer electronics market. But much of his own work for Native Union takes its cues from other industries: the homeware designer Tom Dixon, say, or the Danish design brand HAY. "We try to keep an open mind and take what's good from fashion, sportswear brands, lighting, even the kitchenware business, to find new materials and trends we can bring into tech accessories."

In 2015 Native Union launched the CLIC Marble, the world's first marble phone case. The same line had already included the CLIC Metal and the CLIC Wooden.

A phone case has to protect the phone and say something about its owner's taste, Nauroy says. So they took marble, normally used in home decor, and spent a great deal of effort shaving it thin enough to fit a case — hard, but cool and smooth to the touch. Most important, every piece of marble has its own grain, so whether it is cool matte black or elegant glossy white, each case is one of a kind and no one else will turn up with the same one.

In 2016 they released limited editions of their signature minimalist charging dock. The docks, made for the iPhone and iPad, came in two new color combinations: gold with "midnight blue," and rose gold with "rock grey."

"Users love this charging dock we designed, not just for what it does, but because its minimalist design doesn't diminish the beauty of Apple's own devices — it sets them off," Nauroy said.

"So when we designed new colors for the line, the team wanted to keep its understated character, and matched the dock's silicone and metal parts to the gold and rose gold of users' Apple Watches, iPhones or iPads. The design made an impression of its own while keeping the dock closely in line with the devices themselves in finish and style."

The two founders have always said the brand should take a "luxury" route — not by piling on materials, but in how materials are used and details handled. The run of design awards is indirect confirmation they chose right.

Beyond materials, small clever touches are a Native Union signature, and they come from the design and engineering teams watching where consumers get stuck — proof of how well it works to design around what people need and want.

Take the Night Cable, an extra-long Lightning cable: it has a knot that holds it in place, a playful solution to the problem of a charging cable slipping off the edge of a desk to the floor. The extra length suits charging an iOS device at home, so you can keep using it while it charges.

Its look is bold too: a distinctive braid, in colors chosen to stand out, turning a low-key accessory into an eye-catching one.

Or take the Key Cable, a compact keychain cable that looks like a woven ball and hangs on your keyring, so you can still charge your phone on a day you left the house without a cable.

The keychain is only 10 centimeters long, so it takes up little room on a ring. Wrapped in nylon cord, it is both durable and good-looking.

Unlike home goods, of course, accessories in the consumer electronics business all turn over fast — a product may be replaced or simply break after a few months or a year or two. Perhaps that is why the industry makes so few good things and so much junk.

But Nauroy doesn't see the short lifespan as bad for the company. "It forces the design team to keep reinventing products with new ideas and new solutions."

Then there is the "sense of balance" John Brunner mentioned earlier. Given how closely the business is tied to Apple's release cycle, strategic balance at the company level matters all the more.

Since most Native Union products go with Apple products, autumn is the company's most important stretch of the year.

"Apple launching new products really does create a new season for ours," Igor Duc said. "So we always prepare a batch of products for that season and try to get them to market at exactly the right moment."

Seasonality brings problems too: high-cost luxury goods may sell well over the holidays and then fall off sharply.

"In the past, making these products in volume left us under inventory pressure after Christmas," John Brunner said. Now the whole team plans more strategically at the production stage, balancing costlier inventory against sales targets.

To make more of Native Union's link to Apple products and draw more retailers during the busy autumn and holiday season, Brunner and a few employees even left the Hong Kong headquarters and opened an office in Los Angeles. Today the team works with cities across more than a dozen time zones; besides Apple Store, it sells through top department stores — Barneys in New York, Bloomingdale's in Dubai, Harrods in London — and even colette, the legendary concept store that closed at the end of last year.

The fast-changing smart device market is no longer only a challenge. In Nauroy's words: "Any new device or new technology that comes to market is actually a new opportunity for us."

Image source: Native Union