After Shipping 1 Million Units, Pebble Plans to Reinvent Itself

After two generations of Pebble smartwatches, the Pebble Technology Corporation has plans to preserve the magic, the company CEO Eric Migicovsky has told The Verge.

During the December quarter, Pebble surpassed an important milestone: They sold their one millionth unit. However, a lot has changed since the 2013 launch, as more players have stepped into the wearables market.

The only major competitor was Google’s Android Wear: We’ve seen the launch of plenty of Samsung Gear smartwatches, but less public sales numbers. Last year, however, brought notable changes: Among other players, Apple has officially stepped into the wearables market with the Apple Watch, which will start shipping in April 2015.

As a result, the Pebble founders have plenty of reasons to worry: First of all, the media’s attention has turned to these new players, and one of the most anticipated events of the first half of the year in the tech world is the official launch of the Apple Watch.

Migicovsky, however, is positive: Pebble increased its head count to 100 last year, luring away the webOS TV design team from LG, which was tasked with creating a new software platform. The result will be visible in 2015, as Pebble plans to re-invent itself to preserve momentum: New products and a new software platform are coming.

The new platform will be “unlike anything else used on smartwatches to date”, Migicovsky says. He kept mum on the details, so we will have to wait until later this year to see what has been keeping the Pebble team busy lately.