FIRST LOOK: Unboxing ear (1) black edition w/ Head of Design | Nothing

There's actually three sizes of earplugs that you can work with. I shouldn't call them earplugs. We have a running joke at the office that we call them earplugs. It ******* says earplug on here. Today we're going to unbox this Ear One Black. And so the reference for this was sort of like this, the tape cassettes that you had when you were a kid, that were sort of in this plastic material. And it was the same sort of feeling of like, you know, opening something that was like amazingly fresh, you know, you can only do that once. So we sort of wanted people to have the same experience. I'm just moving stuff around. Okay, so then we get to the inside, this silver box. What's this? A brand new Ear One Black. Nice. And there's like a little tab that helps you take it out of here. I'm just gonna put that there. Okay, wow. It looks very polished. There's been some changes to things. First of all, it's like a kind of smoky plastic, which is kind of nice. And also we have like a matte finish to the earbud. Okay, and then we also have like this. This is here, maybe you want to see both of them side by side. The two friends. We also changed the approach that we use for marking the case as well. So that means that we're using laser engraving in the transparent plastic, which gives like a really, really, I'm not sure if you can see that. But it's like a very, very precise way of doing the artwork. You can see a little bit more on the back as well. So we worked hard on that. What we've found is that, you know, fingerprints and scratches and things like that are a lot more visible. And we sort of have this idea at nothing that we don't use any secondary processes. So that means that, you know, when we take parts out of the tool, we're not allowed to coat them or do any kind of scratch resistant coatings, things that, you know, like tricks that people usually do. And we sort of want to avoid those like chemicals and those sort of processes and just work with the material in a much more honest way. We took a lot of time just getting the tonality of the smoky plastic exactly right. Nick, can you bring over some of the tries that we did? It's like a McDonald's menu. Yeah, so here's like some of the tries that we did. We sort of did everything from like super, super cold, you know, with like a little bit of green into it, with something a little bit more like natural and brown. We actually had like, we had ordered five tons of material in this tone. And then sort of realized after we did a lot more studies that, you know, we had to call and stop the production. This is a true story. I'm not sure if we want to admit this. But, you know, we had to call like, just as the guy was like about to push the go button on the machine. That was a crazy day, you know. But in the end, I think we sort of arrived at something that feels like nothing. You know, it's quite balanced. It doesn't scream too much in one direction or another. We always try to think about making products that last, you know, for a really, really long time. Objects that can stand the test of time. Okay, so if we start to look at the buds, you know, when you start to work with transparency in this way, that was sort of the idea that we wanted to just, we wanted to work with the engineering of the product. We didn't want to do any styling. But we didn't realize, you know, exactly what that would mean for us. So, you know, if we just take, for instance, the pogo pins here, these two little dots that you have on the back of the earbud of the stem, you know, these ones, they sort of connect into the case here, together with this magnet. And that's what charges up the earbuds. And just to work with them in this way, to have these two dots, they're sort of inside of a, like co-molded in the housing. Three vendors actually threw us out of the building, you know, like they didn't want to work with us because of this. Because as soon as you start to work with how things look under the hood, you know, a lot of manufacturers, they aren't used to working in that way. So we had to, for the magnet on the back here, we sort of had to develop, you know, a completely new process for sort of shaping this and working with the surface in this way to get it to look like up to scratch, I would say. You know, from the start, we sort of had this idea that the red and the white dot, which is super, super important detail to us, because it helps you to, you know, immediately understand which ear it should go into. You know, we thought that we could just print this onto the FPC because everything that you see, you know, on the outside of the stem, that's a functional component. We also went through, I think, like five or ten suppliers to help us to do this. And in the end, you know, it's actually these red and white dots are placed by hand by someone as like one of the final steps of the assembly. And that was the only way that we could get the colour, get the finish exactly the way that we wanted. You know, it's also the case with the texture on the inner part. This was like a 45 hour process of placing every one of these dots, the dots of the texture manually by hand, because you have surfaces like very, very complex surfaces, you know, with a lot of bends. And to get the dots to line up from every angle, we went to agencies, suppliers across the globe. We went, you know, we had a team in Germany, in Italy, in China, trying to sort of map this with software, but they couldn't do it. So in the end, it was like the design team placing every one of the dots by hand to get it to like line up. Yeah, that was like a crazy, crazy period. Yeah, we didn't do the rest of the packaging as well. Let's do it. We can pull out this moulded paper pole with this hole in the centre. Very convenient. OK, so inside we have three different boxes. We have some ear tips. So when you get ear one, it's shipped with a medium tip on it, which should work for many, many ears. But if it sort of feels uncomfortable and you can do a test where you... Then you could sort of fit with like a small or a large ear tip, depending on the size of your ear. We also have a little type C cable. So this is for charging. And then a manual inside of this little sleeve as well. And then there's also like a lot of very important legal information that you should all, you know, get a cup of a warm cup of joe and have a read of that. And it sort of starts with a QR code. So you can scan this one with your phone and then install the app. That's super, super good because the app has like a lot of extra features on there. So everything from sort of software updates to tweaking the EQ exactly as you like. I really recommend to download that one. And then, yeah, we have all the information about how to pair and the different touch controls, charging and all of that stuff. So that's the manual. I think we have successfully disassembled the entire packaging. That's cool. So that's it. We've unboxed the Ear One Black. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you found some of this interesting or useful. I'm Tom, head of design at Nothing. And see you next time.