Music From Your Sunglasses? Zungle Crowdfunds $2M For Shades With Bone-Conduction Speakers

One of the latest hot crowdfunding campaigns is for dark sunglasses called the Zungle Panther with bone-conduction technology that allows them to be used to listen to music and make phone calls. Jason Yang, Zungle’s 30-year-old CEO and co-founder, came up with the idea because he was annoyed with trying to wear an earpiece and sunglasses to listen to music while wakeboarding.

“We all love extreme sports, and Jason is a huge fan of wakeboarding,” says Sean Bang, 30, Zungle’s chief marketing officer and co-founder. “He’ll have sunglasses on, but eventually the earphone doesn’t work with the sunglasses, and he felt that it was inconvenient and uncomfortable. So we decided to get rid of the inconvenience.”

With Zungle’s sunglasses, wearers can listen to music or make phone calls while skiing, biking or wakeboarding without worrying about an additional earpiece. Bone-conduction technology, in which you hear sound through vibrations to your skull rather than through your ears, isn’t new. But the idea of putting it into relatively inexpensive consumer products, like sunglasses, has been gaining traction recently.

So after fiddling with the product for nearly a year, in June, the two friends, who had worked together at marketing firm Innocean Worldwide in South Korea, along with two other cofounders, Chris Hong and Injun Park, turned to Kickstarter with a stated goal of $50,000 for their high-tech sunglasses. As with many crowdfunding campaigns, that $50,000 number was a lowball one; Yang says “about $1 million” was their actual goal. The Zungle Panther has a similar look to Oakley’s shades, and retails for $150. Backers who chipped in $89 could get them in a choice of colors as a “reward.” “When we started, we didn’t have enough money to create this product,” Bang says. “We chose Kickstarter because we can target everyone around the globe.”

By the time the campaign ended, in mid-July, Zungle had raised more than $1.9 million, putting it among Kickstarter’s top 100 campaigns of all-time.

During its run, the campaign became so popular that someone launched a fake Zungle campaign on competing crowdfunding site, Indiegogo, while they were fundraising on Kickstarter. “Scam Alerts!” Zungle posted to backers and would-be backers on July 11^th. “We have not posted Zungle anywhere other than Kickstarter. You can only buy them via Kickstarter. Thank you very much for those who reported the FAKE Zungle campaign on Indiegogo.” After a backer alerted them to the impersonator, they contacted Indiegogo, which took the fake campaign down, Bang says. “It was a scam, I guess,” he says now.

Now, Yang, Bang and the Zungle team are in South Korea, sussing out factories that can produce the more than 11,000 pairs of sunglasses they promised their Kickstarter backers by November. “We are from Korea, and we know much about Korea,” Yang says. “They [the Korean factories] are quick and can provide better quality than the Chinese factories.”

As with many crowdfunding campaigns, it will be a scramble to get the products finished and to backers on time. Zungle has promised November, so that its backers can have them before Christmas. “We’ll do our best,” Bang says.

In the meantime, in late-July, just a few weeks after the Kickstarter campaign closed, they launched a new “in demand” campaign on Indiegogo that allows them to effectively keep pre-selling to those who didn’t get in on the campaign the first time. The new backers will have to kick in $119 to get the sunglasses, more than those who were early adopters on Kickstarter, but less than the eventual retail cost. That type of variable pricing is generally a smart move for a startup that’s raising a lot of money by crowdfunding as it helps shrink the gap between the real price and the earlybird special. The Indiegogo backers will also get their sunglasses on a delayed timetable; the campaign promises February 2017, three months later than the Kickstarter backers will get them. Why do another crowdfunding campaign before even delivering on the first? “For mass production, we have a minimum quantity that we have to meet,” Bang says, “and people kept asking us for another campaign.” Longer term, like any company that first launches on Kickstarter, they’ll need to get beyond any manufacturing hurdles, then figure out how to distribute their products more broadly.

Zungle’s effort, in many ways, builds off the technology in Google Glass, which was launched in 2013. But Google Glass was a far more complex, and expensive, product. “The starting point of Zungle is Google Glass, which has bone conduction technology. We thought they looked goofy. So we hoped to make something cool and wearable,” Yang says. For the founders, the design – and the marketing – was crucial.

To streamline their design, they nixed functions they didn’t think were important, like the ability to check your heartrate. “Both of us are huge fans of technology and fashion and street culture,” Bang says. “The look and feel of our campaign is very much skateboarding and street culture.”

Longer term, they hope to continue to improve the design, and to launch other products in both the sunglass market and the earphone and headphone one. Both of those markets are large, but crowded with competitors. The current sunglasses are made of plastic; they’d like to launch a new model made from metal as their next product. “We have heard from tech that it is too difficult, but we hope to do it,” Yang says. “Maybe in 2018, we can discuss adding a camera – or Pokémon Go.” “He’s just kidding,” Bang says.

It’s 3 a.m. Saturday morning in Korea, and after a long day, Yang and Bang are getting punchy. “Has it been hard to found a company with friends?” I ask.

“Yeeeaaah,” Bang says.

“We are not friends anymore, we are just partners,” Yang replies.

“He is not serious,” says Bang. “We are still very close.”

“Sometimes it is hard,” he continues, “but it is also very helpful. We don’t have to be super-serious all the time because we know each other. We already understand what each other want and need.”