The first smart sports underwear is available, do you want to try it?

If you put the function of the smart bracelet into your underwear, will you pay for it?

It is understood that the words "smart, technology" have always been male patents. After all, enthusiasts' pursuit of technological intelligence products is like women's loyalty to cosmetics. However, with the boom of technology products spreading from bracelets, glasses, etc. to apparel, coupled with the heat of the sports market, cutting into the women's sports market with smart underwear has become the choice of more and more companies. This kind of smart underwear designed for women. It also began to appear frequently in people's sights.

In foreign countries, from the technology company Intel, Japanese underwear brand Ravijour, the secret of Victoria who just finished this year's big show, different manufacturers are exploring the research of this new product, and have released smart underwear products; in the domestic, old underwear Brand Amour also launched the Aimersports professional sports brand, and recently released the first smart sports underwear to the new market for card slots.

The newly released smart underwear can realize various functions, such as realizing the function of the sports bracelet; it can also monitor the heartbeat through the underwear. When the boys encounter let their heart beat more than the average value, the bra will be automatically unlocked. Women find "true love"; they can also achieve the function of breast massage...

However, these different functions of underwear are often called not to sell. Fortunately, the ambition of underwear brands is not just to do a smart sports bra, but to further occupy the fast-growing sports underwear market through this mouth.

It’s not easy to make underwear smart

Realize step counting, heart rate detection; record motion data, including calories burned, exercise intensity, etc.; provide voice broadcasts, correct motion postures... In the past, these functions can be realized through smart bracelets, now built by Amour The smart chip underwear can be realized with the Appreciation Sports App.

Perhaps, from a functional point of view, this smart underwear only fits the sports bracelet into the underwear, but according to Concon, the merchandise manager of the Amour Sportswear Division, the product has spent a full year and a half from design to official release. time. "It is necessary to go through trial and error to determine how many times the two will not be detached, and the slings, motor cloth, and smart chips are all adjusted to the right state. It takes half a year to match this."

Last year, Ai Er Institute of Ergonomics has been collecting a large amount of data, through dozens of capture devices to capture and detect women's sports behavior, to obtain data on motor inertia, posture behavior, etc., to derive what fabrics should be used in sports underwear during women's sports. , structure and process to support the correct trajectory, thus correcting the chest strain caused by exercise tension to women. Intelligent underwear is on the support of high-intensity sports underwear, added to the smart chip to complete the detection and feedback of human motion data. "But the hard smart chip and the soft material of the underwear are combined to make the consumer feel no foreign body, which is the most difficult place in the development process." Concon said.

In order to solve the discomfort of wearing, I love to replace the plastic rubber-type sling in the conventional consciousness with the motor cloth sling. This ring-shaped golden bio-material and sensor is the core value of AI smart underwear. This seemingly small circular bio-material is stitched inside the underside of the sports underwear. The accented sensor tag can read tiny biometric signals, even in the noisy gym. It does not affect the capture. App data display and real-time broadcast function, the heart rate during exercise, aerobic or anaerobic exercise status, calories and other data consumed in real time are fed back to the consumer for the first time, for women in sports, “just like having A private coach."

At the same time, the back of this underwear is designed with mesh stitching fabric, which has good ventilation effect for high-intensity sports such as running and net feather. It also has three sizes of 160 (CM), 165 (CM) and 175 (CM). The sports brand's underwear is basically the same.

After solving the practicality, considering that women are more concerned about the aesthetics of Clothing than men, Ai Mu reduces the area of ​​the board by 63% through the use of internal high-precision components and double-sided circuit board technology. The smart chip is reduced to the size of the thumb, and the thickest part is only 7mm. In August of this year, the first batch of smart underwear was sold at the same time in the “Love Muscat Flagship Store” and offline, with a total sales volume of nearly 1,000.

Smart underwear is not good to sell?

In fact, the attempt to intelligentize underwear like Ai is not a new thing.

In 2014, Ravijour launched a bra that monitors heart rate. Its internal sensor analyzes the “heart rate” of the wearer to determine whether it needs to be automatically unlocked. For example, when a girl sees this boy's heartbeat, the heartbeat will automatically unravel when the heartbeat exceeds the average bra.

At the end of the same year, Victoria’s secret also introduced a smart bra, but its focus was on monitoring the wearer’s heart rate through the heart rate “band” under the cup. Subsequently, Intel and the brand Chromat collaborated in 2015 to introduce ChromatAerosSportsBra using human body data such as heart rate and body temperature collected by sensors. The introduction of these products has enabled smart underwear, which has been stuck in the labs of technology companies or universities, to enter the mass market.

However, after these products have captured the eyes of consumers, the status quo does not seem to be good. In the hottest period of wearable devices in 2013, Intel established the NDG business unit focusing on this field, but this year it has already announced that it plans to shrink the wearable device business, and even withdraw from the field, the NDG business covering the business. The Ministry of Information on the massive layoffs. Although Intel explicitly denied the withdrawal of the wearable device field, it did not respond to the rumors of personnel adjustment.

Since the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain still need to be cultivated, ordinary processing plants cannot complete new product production. Large-scale mass production requires a large amount of capital invested in technical equipment, and more intelligent underwear than a few products on the market. Still only staying in the "concept" or testing stage, has not been able to enter the mainstream market.

"For many people, intelligence is more of a concept of technology than a concept of life. So in the past, everyone's ideas did not use intelligence in clothing, and more in electronics." Concon analyzed that the original underwear industry did not really form a "smart" environment, and fortunately, the concept of consumers is changing. "Today, consumers are beginning to pay attention to the relationship between wearing and their own, and the market gradually embraces intelligence to protect people. The idea." This is an opportunity for the enterprise, and it is also the best time for the “enclosure”.

In order to promote products in a market where the consumption atmosphere is relatively lacking, Aimer chose to lower the threshold of consumption, and set the promotion price of the original price of 780 yuan smart underwear to 600 yuan, which is almost the same as the price of love high-strength underwear. At the same time, taking into account the high frequency of replacement of sports underwear, a replacement underwear that can be installed with smart chips will be further introduced later. “Consumers only need to take down the smart chip and press it to replace it. The operation is very simple”. Concon said the process couldn't take five seconds.

In addition, in order to make the product influence among the main audiences, Ai Mu sought the current popular network red to create a fashion for the product, and formed a cooperation with the professional sports and fitness KOL, variety show, for the professional platform of the product. It will circle the first wave of purchase users into the pool, collect product feedback data from them, and use it for subsequent optimization and improvement of products to enhance the humanization and affinity of smart chips.

Real purpose

From the current point of view, the smart underwear on the market can be mainly divided into two types: one is a recording underwear based on sports effects and body data like Amour, and the other is a women's health underwear that mainly functions like breast massage. . In Concon's view, the embedding of these external devices is only the beginning of smart underwear. Future underwear will achieve essential breakthroughs in styling, materials and craftsmanship, such as respirable materials and temperature adjustment on fabrics. "Intelligent underwear is a product of the love movement. In fact, the main focus is on sports. Creating sports underwear with different strengths and functions is something we will do in the next year or two."

With the prevalence of healthy living concepts, sports, yoga and other sports are gradually recognized and accepted by women, and the improvement of living standards has made women's functional and aesthetic requirements for sportswear increasingly demanding. According to research data from Mintel, China's sportswear market grew by 18% in 2015, accounting for 6% of total apparel sales, with a market share of about 124.5 billion yuan. It is precisely to see that the sports market is showing awakening trend. Three years ago, Ai Mu began to prepare for the cloth sports underwear market.

"Sports are no longer just a special group of people, they have become more and more people's living conditions, and even social activities. I used to go shopping, and now I am going to play and go to the gym. For women, in addition to a pair of running shoes, I need one. Sports underwear." Concon revealed that despite the downturn in the apparel industry this year, the sports underwear industry is still in a period of rapid growth. The sales of Aiming Sports Underwear are in a state of blowout. "Even when there were some styles that were not sold enough, the channels for good growth were 100%~ With a 200% increase, there will be a 10% to 20% increase in the department store format."

Starting from the movement of women's physical and mental health, based on the needs of the scene, Aiwei derives the entire product chain. For example, in the face of the current consumer behavior and work, life zero-switching scene, the concept of sports commuting is derived, and the growth space based on the sports market. As well as the gradual maturity of technology, the introduction of smart underwear is a further enrichment of the sports underwear product line.

Concon said that the late smart chips will also be more widely used in other brands of Aimer, such as Mr. Ai Mu, and admiring children. In the face of the quality of the sports underwear industry, there are a series of chaotic problems such as quality, homogenization, price war, etc., in order to break through the bottleneck, the brand must also be developed from rough to subdivided, to achieve true "fine" and "special" ".