The rockstar building China’s answer to Beats

Wang Feng, sporting an earlier set of FIIL cans, is building up China’s answer to Dr. Dre’s Beats, which sold to Apple in 2014 for US$3 billion. Wang started FIIL in 2015. Photo credit: FIIL.

Chinese rockstar Wang Feng is pulling a Dr. Dre with his headphones brand. Like Beats, Beijing-based FIIL glosses itself as fashionable but still high-fidelity.

Wang rose to fame in China in the late 1990s. Now 45, he’s morphing into a rock veteran who likes juggling lots of projects – such as his headphones startup, launched just last year, as well as his position in the big, red chair as one of the judges on China’s version of The Voice.

Most of FIIL’s customers are in mainland China, but like a number of young hardware startups across the nation, it’s aiming to go global in the hope of replicating the success of DJI, Xiaomi, and OnePlus.

That’s why FIIL is hitting Kickstarter this weekend, taking pre-orders for the Carat Pro, a set of wireless headphones that come with some sporty features. (Updated five days after publishing: The Kickstarter is here.)

The Carat Pro earphones connect wirelessly to your phone – but they sport a handy wire that connects the pair together so that they’re not easy to lose. Photo credit: FIIL.

The buds do real-time heart rate monitoring, audio coaching, and tracking of distance, steps, and workout duration. It’s the first time the company is blending a fitness tracker with its earphones.

The Carat Pro earphones connect wirelessly to your phone, but they won’t be as easy to lose as some other Bluetooth buds – looking at you, Apple – thanks to the handy wire that connects the pair together. In terms of size and shape, they’re a little like Will.i.am’s Button earphones, which came out last month. But FIIL is a bit cheaper.

Come on FIIL the noize

Leon Wu, FIIL’s CTO with a decade of experience in audio engineering, name-checks Beats and Bose as brands that the startup admires. “We try to absorb good things from both,” he says.

Inside FIIL’s anechoic chamber with CTO Leon Wu at its R&D center. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

Just like OnePlus does to the iPhone, FIIL pitches its headphones – it has five models so far, a mix of cans and in-ears – as being top-spec but about half the price of comparable premium brands.

Most of the crew is split between two offices – the mobile app people up in the capital, and the hardware folks, Leon included, in Suzhou, a city just outside Shanghai.