Apple is not the only one with a lot riding on the Apple Watch, the high-tech timepiece that became available for pre-orders Friday and gets into customers’ hands later this month.
The new smartwatch is also a gamble for third-party accessory makers that are cooking up all manner of products — wristbands, screen protectors, charging stands — for the device.
And while many of these companies have cut their teeth on accessories for Apple’s iPad and iPhone, and in some cases made fortunes, that’s no guarantee the Apple Watch will be another bonanza.
One case in point: Minneapolis-based Pad & Quill, which manufactures a number of its products in St. Paul.
Founder Brian Holmes, an experienced maker of iPhone and iPad accessories, is rolling the dice once again with an all-new line of accessories for the Apple Watch.
The products include a folding watch stand made of wood, a selection of leather carrying cases and a food tray-like “caddy” with a built-in watch stand and compartments for an iPhone and house keys.
These products are set to ship in the weeks right after the Apple Watch’s April 24 release.
Any such accessory launch “is kind of fretful,” Holmes acknowledged. “You design a product, you see what you think people would like to buy, but until you’ve announced it, you have no idea how well it will do.”
He had doubts about the watch stand while it was being developed, for instance. “Maybe this is just stupid,” he recalls thinking to himself.
Initial watch-stand orders on the Pad & Quill site, however, look relatively promising so far, he noted.
“We’ve seen enough sales that we feel this is worth the investment,” he said. “This looks like a product we will be able to keep selling for the rest of the year.”
Ironically, Holmes had not given the Apple Watch much thought in the days and weeks after its September unveiling because he was so busy making and shipping cases for the then new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
This made sense because the iPhone is major money maker. In just the two weeks after its release late last year, it sparked about $250 million in accessory sales, according to the NPD Group. The handsets are part of a phone-accessory market that was pegged at $51 billion as of late last year, according to U.K.-based ABI Research.
But as often happens, the phone-focused Holmes got a nudge when he least expected it.
A Wired technology journalist familiar with Pad & Quill’s products called to ask him about his plans for the Apple Watch. A flummoxed Holmes had none but did not want to admit it, so he said something vague yet quotable about exploring options.
Then he had to make good on that amorphous pledge. This presented a huge challenge, partly because of his company’s very-particular clientele. These customers “are very demanding because they are using Apple products,” Holmes noted.
What’s more, the Apple Watch is being hyped as high-fashion as well as high-tech and is made of such materials as 18-karat gold. Holmes knew his products had to be worthy of such a fancy and futuristic device.
LOOKING TO THE PAST
So, improbably, he looked to the past.
A few years ago, his grandmother passed on to him a pocket watch that had once belonged to his long-deceased grandfather. He needed a way to show off the timepiece and vaguely remembered seeing folding wooden stands for this purpose.
Scouring the Internet, he found and snapped up a couple of these stands, both about a century old yet in decent condition. One of them turned out to be a reasonably good fit for his grandfather’s pocket watch.
This became the inspiration for a product called the Luxury Pocket Stand for Apple Watch, a compact wooden holder that can be folded up for convenient transport — a feature that makes it unique among Apple Watch stands coming to market.
The $70 Pocket Stand — carved out of American cherry, African mahogany or walnut — is made entirely in Minnesota. Its two main components are cut from lengths of wood using a CNC router, a kind of computer-driven cutting machine, at a CNC RouterWorks plant in Foley, Minn. They’re then shipped to a Pad & Quill shop in Minneapolis for sanding, painting and polishing.
The result is a gadget with two hinged parts that make it vaguely reminiscent of a “Star Trek” communicator. The portion of the Pocket Stand that flips upward to suspend the Apple Watch in midair has a cutout for the smartwatch’s small, circular charger, which essentially becomes part of the stand.
When collapsed, the Pocket Stand becomes a smallish wooden slab with rounded edges that can be slipped into a pocket, handbag or one of Pad & Quill’s new leather accessory holders. These have compartments for the stand, the charging cable and, in some cases, a spare watchband.
Holmes said he can’t release his stand until he has an Apple Watch and charger to put on it for final tweaking, such as how the watch charger and its cord fit into the stand’s wooden grooves. But he noted that the stand was easier to design than an iPhone case, which requires more precise guesswork about an unreleased handset’s measurements.
‘A MASSIVE SMARTWATCH WAVE’
Pad & Quill is not the only accessory maker taking a risk on an unproven Apple product.
The Apple Watch set off a stampede of companies aiming to cash in on the gleaming new gadget, including well-established Apple-accessory vendors like DODOcase, Twelve South and Griffin Technology.
Nashville-based Griffin, which recently announced a vertically elongated Apple Watch stand with room for an iPhone on the accessory base, said making products for the watch is a calculated risk.
“With a new Apple device, we don’t have any real history or data,” said Andrew Biddle, the company’s category manager for stands and mounts. But Apple historically hasn’t “had too many stinkers.”
The challenge, Biddle said, is creating a meticulously measured accessory for an Apple product that hasn’t been released.
“We don’t have an Apple watches here,” he said. “That’s a popular misconception. We would love to, but we have to go on educated guesses. We watch all the Apple keynotes over and over and over to see what details we’ve missed.”
Newer accessory companies are looking for a piece of the action, too.
Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Nomad, for instance, is staking its future not only on the Apple Watch but also on the smartwatch in general. Its initial products include a metal Apple Watch charging stand and a mobile battery pack called the Pod to keep the Apple Watch juiced up. More such products are in the pipeline.
“A massive smartwatch wave is coming,” said Nomad CEO Noah Dentzel. “We believe the smartwatch will become the No. 1 personal device in two to four years. The smartphone won’t die overnight, but there will be a transition period.”
Dentzel, who previously focused his company on smartphone-charging adapters, is positioning Nomad for that watch surge. “We want to be the first movers,” he said.
A host of just-out-of-the-gate tech startups are betting big on the Apple Watch, as well.
These include a San Francisco-based startup called Rest, which recently announced a Composure charging platform consisting of a wood slab with a circular cut-out for the Apple Watch’s charger. On Friday, Rest revealed that the Composure will be one of several magnetically interlocking accessories — including wooden trays for keys, glasses, pens and phones.
Rest finds itself in the sometimes-thrilling, sometimes-scary position of depending all but entirely on the Apple Watch for its initial success.
“It’s terrifying, because I’m leaving a pretty decent job as far as pay and position,” said Rest founder Kyle McConnell. Also, “getting into the accessory market is a scary thing, because things change so quickly year over year.”
But “it’s exciting to be able to control your own vision” for a company, McConnell said.
BEYOND THE APPLE WATCH
The Twin Cities’ Pad & Quill is in a fairly secure position because of a highly diversified product line.
Its Apple Watch line initially will be small potatoes compared with its gangbuster trade in cases for iPhones, iPads and Amazon Kindle e-book readers.
These are what made the company profitable just two years after its founding in 2010. And they’re what have made Pad & Quill a darling of the tech-blog set with rave posts about its product releases.
The iPhone and iPad cases, consisting of wood frames surrounded by book-like leather bindings, are also made in Minnesota.
The frames are stamped out of wood sheets at the Foley facility. The frames are refined at Pad & Quill’s Minneapolis shop and then shipped to Trendex, a St. Paul bookbinder, where they are sheathed in leather to resemble elegant hardcovers.
Pad & Quill also offers leather-and-canvas gadget bags in an arrangement with a Mexican manufacturer that uses full-grain hides harvested from steers in the United States.
“I love design and working with craftsmen,” said Holmes, who runs his company with his wife, Kari. “When I have a rough idea for a product, a vision, we sit down and banter about what is possible. It’s a constant dance of creating something, and I’m constantly getting educated about how wood and leather and canvas work.”
Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes about technology. Find him at ojezap.com.