Meet WTEU17 speaker Frederik Hermann, Head of Marketing & Sales at Huami. The company the second largest manufacturer of wearables in the world and built the Mi Band, Amazfit Pace, and the Arc just to name a few.
Huami is a very young company operating in the field for about 2 years now, still the company managed to become one of the largest manufacturers for wearables in an instant. How do you explain your rapid success?
First, the team. Huami was founded only two years ago but many team members have been in consumer electronics for over 15 years – the development and learnings from success and failure of previous products is the foundation of avoiding mistakes and developing successful products now. Based on this experience, the company has a keen understanding of customer needs and the ability to turn it into a concise product definition. Also, the team members in R&D building our growing technology stack as well as marketing bring years of experience in consumer electronics and wearable technologies with them. Second, we did focus our product definition on exercise and health, especially with our GPS running watch Amazfit Pace, Strava integration and many features for Amazfit Arc. All the functions and technological parameters are centering around this demand. Third, our hardware development office is located in Shenzhen, close to the supply chain and the manufacturing centers, which allows us to improve the hardware R&D efficiency and to control the cost of manufacturing closely.
As makers and designers of the Mi Band products for Xiaomi you were involved in a product that changed the landscape of fitness trackers. They became available for everyone and more importantly you showed the other manufacturers how real mass production is done! Can you share what is coming next in the Mi Band family and also in terms of trends for the wearable market from your perspective?
Sorry, we can not comment on Xiaomi’s future product strategy. As an industry, we need to further innovate to help people achieve their health and fitness goals, provide personalized cues how to break bad habits and encouragement on the way to establish healthy ones. Apart from more specialized medical applications we also need to look into building in more utility that make our lives easier, like payments, transit, identity recognition, building access and IoT integrations for instance.
How and up to what level can you support Wearable companies with your services?
Data. We have access to a vast amount of valuable health data and cooperate regularly with research institutions and companies in this industry. Data security and user privacy are prerequisite to any collaboration. We are also expanding our product research and development in the areas of NFC, AI, VR and are open to further cooperations with different industries and fields. Our user authentication and data APIs allow for collaborations in regards to data services but also product co-development in affiliated industries.
Do you personally wear a wearable? If so which one and why?
Yes, we all wear multiple products at a time. Not only our own but also the ones from competitors in this industry for comparison. We all thoroughly test our own products but the one I have been wearing consistently is the Amazfit Equator ceramic tracker in combination with the black sport band. It’s so lightweight, slim and unobtrusive that I don’t even feel wearing it while still getting all the benefits of accurate activity and sleep tracking with a very long battery life. If we wouldn’t wear and use wearables on a daily basis, it would be hard to understand customer demand and how to improve our products
Interested in meeting Frederik in person and to learn more about Huami? Join us in Munich on February 7 and 8 at the WT | Wearable Technologies Conference 2017 EUROPE where he will talk about “Designing Wearable Fitness for Everyone”.
