So what is it about the company that keeps customers coming back, watch after watch? Several Pebble owners say it’s a combination of factors, including its price, which currently ranges from $100 for the original Pebble to $250 and up for the Pebble Time Steel. And it has cultivated a loyal fan base in a fickle market where many of the people who buy wrist-worn gadgets quickly toss them in a drawer plenty of the people backing its latest Kickstarter campaign, for instance, have done so in the past, too. It helped spur the development of the still small but quickly growing market for smart watches with its original Pebble, which began shipping in early 2013-the market for wearables, driven largely by smart watches and fitness trackers, is expected to climb to 110 million gadgets shipping out this year, according to IDC. Pebble’s latest smart watches, the Pebble 2 (right) and Time 2 (left), and its new gadget for runners, the Pebble Core (center), raised over $1 million in an hour on Kickstarter. Beyond bringing in roughly $40 million in Kickstarter money to date, it has raised only about $15.4 million in venture capital financing. Technology market researcher IDC ranks Pebble’s smart-watch software as the fourth-most popular, far behind leaders like Apple’s Watch OS and Google’s Android Wear, and as a smart-watch vendor it doesn’t even crack IDC’s top five (Apple leads there, followed by Samsung). Pebble is by no measure a large consumer-electronics company, or even a very big smart-watch company CEO and founder Eric Migicovsky says it has shipped over two million smart watches to date, and estimates that only about 15 percent of sales are through its three crowdfunding campaigns. ![]() Of the three Kickstarter campaigns currently ahead of it in the rankings, two of them were also for Pebble products: its first smart watch, the eponymously named Pebble, raised $10.3 million in 2012 after seeking $100,000, while the Pebble Time snagged $20.3 million last year with a goal of raising $500,000. This might be impressive for some companies, but for Pebble it’s old hat.
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