Subscribe

Aniyia told me, “At first, we had this idea that we could pull together the technical co-founder, the creative person, the business person, and we’re just gonna build this team and we’re gonna be scrappy and do this thing, and I think that works for a lot of people. For us, we found that we could optimize our momentum by working with people who are professionals, and because of that first investment, we were able to shift our resources to do it that way, and it was a better decision for us. It allowed us to move more quickly and to have partners who knew what they were doing instead of just feeling around in the dark.”

In other words, having an idea is great and having supportive people is fantastic, but to really make that idea come to fruition, professional knowledge and expertise are necessary. You may not have it, and that’s fine, but someone else out there does and it’s a good idea to learn from those who are successfully doing the thing that you want to do.

Speaking more specifically about the Dipper audio necklace, Aniyia tells me that she was intent on learning from those who came before her because, as she says, “We’re choosing something that is not new technology. Headphones have been around for decades, and that’s why we really believe in starting here with this product. The future that I want for this company is to be making lots of different kinds of tech jewelry for women, all with different designs, different collections, and different functionalities, and starting with the headphones makes sense because it’s something that we know is proven and tested.”

Aniyia says, “Thinking about wearables in general, I use some myself, and we have to consider things that are nice to have vs. things that are need to have. In some cases, the wearable either hasn’t fully demonstrated its purpose in your life, or it’s trying to alter the way you live your life. I’ve had two Fitbits so far, and used them each for maybe a week. I’m just not into working out—it didn’t fit for me because I don’t care how many steps I take, and I’m not interested in increasing them. For some people, that’s great and it motivates them, but for me it’s like it was trying to change some facet of my life that I’m not really ready to change. Headphones, on the other hand, are a demonstrated need that compliments the things that are always at your fingertips: your tablet, your phone, your laptop. There’s a hole in consumer electronics, which is designing products with women in mind. Women are relegated to getting a pink version of an item, or leopard print, and that’s it.”

At this point in our conversation I was waving my church fan at this good word, as I happen to be against randomly leopard-print electronics and other such lady-fied versions of products as overly gendered deviations from the thing as it exists in the first place. The message there is that men are the default consumer. Designing a piece of wearable tech jewelry specifically for women is not the same as slapping some pink polka dots on your already-made product.

Aniyia looks at those girly electronics and says, “No, we can do better than that, and women deserve better. Women are massive consumers of electronics and we always have our technology in hand, and I want to think about the way that women think about utility. I think that men think about utility in a way of does it work: does it [do X thing it’s supposed to do], with less regard to style.”

Indeed, even the most stylish of men will still defer to a speaker or headphones that could look any which way, or ones that look the way Apple and Beats told them they should look, with little deviation. Individual style takes a backseat to status, and we’re left with homogenized items on our bodies and in our hands, when those things could just as easily be treated as stylish accessories.

I have a personal hatred of the current popular Bluetooth headphones design that looks like a plastic ring that sits around one’s neck and has earbuds attached. Living in New York City, every third person I pass on the street and every other person at the gym is wearing these hideous things in a variety of colors, and indeed my recent shopping excursions to replace my headphones revealed that this is the prevailing design on the market, and it was incredibly difficult to find headphones that were not Beats and didn’t look like a plastic collar to indicate that you’ll be in the first herd of humans to be rounded up when the aliens come.

I feel like it’s horrific to be a grown adult with this plastic ring around your neck, and I think it’s inappropriate for SO many people to be wearing something of essentially the same design. I’m deliberate about what I wear, and I don’t want anything on me that I specifically didn’t choose to put on me that day. The things that we choose to put on our bodies say something about us. Every item makes a statement and personally, I don’t want that statement to be ‘I went to Best Buy just like everyone else.’ I don’t want to be a sheep.

« Previous page 1 2 3 Next page »

For 2024’s iteration of MadameNoire and HelloBeautiful’s annual series Women to Know, we knew we wanted to celebrate the people who help make the joys of film and television possible. To create art is to create magic. This year, we spotlight Hollywood Executive’s changing the face of cinema.