After spending the last seven years disrupting LVMH’s Spanish luxury brand Loewe, Charlie Smith is the new chief marketing officer of Nothing. And that is nothing to scoff at.
Founded by Carl Pei in 2020, the consumer tech brand, which manufactures smartphones, earbuds and other connected devices, has raised more than $450 million in funding and is valued at $1.3 billion. Nothing aims to put the design-focus back into devices in an era of screen burnout.
“Back in the late nineties, I was obsessed with Apple,” says Smith. “Now everyone has been copying Apple and you have just these boring slabs of aluminium and glass.”
Smith’s mission: to unseat Apple as the tech for creatives by building a brand based on rebellious creativity that challenges the status quo (as the Cupertino-based brand once did). Nothing’s tagline is “Built Different,” a nod to Apple’s 1997 “Think Different.” Nothing phones are constructed to support the human, not to optimize scrolling. The company sees its opportunity to be the tech brand for the native AI generation. “We’re at this moment of an AI revolution that I genuinely believe is going to be as transformative as electricity or the internet,” says Smith.
“We are designing technology that gets out of the way and allows you to live your life to its fullest,” he adds.
Nothing shows up in culture where the cool kids hang out. During Paris Fashion Week, they weren’t on the runways. They hosted a runway watch party in a Parisian movie theater with French fashion influencer Lyas. Lyas couldn’t get into a Dior show, so started hosting view parties that drew thousands of fashion students in Paris, becoming a cultural moment of its own, which Nothing helped support. When Nothing launched their new pink 4A phone they graffitied their own billboards with pink messaging and hosted a launch event at Central Saint Martins – an art school in London – the day after an Apple event.
“That’s the irreverent, slightly punk attitude that you can expect more from us in the future,” explains Smith.
Smith has built his career on bringing digital innovation to brands including Nokia, Microsoft and building the first-ever Facebook campaign for the cereal Shreddies. At Loewe, he was tasked with disrupting luxury fashion for the digital era. “In the olden days with fashion brands, you got exposure with a 10-page editorial spread in Vogue,” he explains. “But with social media, suddenly you had the possibility to have a direct conversation with your customers. You could build your own in-house content studio and have an editorial point of view.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Smith near his offices in Kings Cross in London to discuss design, AI and how the brand is working to unseat Apple as the tech brand for creatives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you going to get people to give up their iPhones and Android phones?
We want to become the most loved tech company for the next generation of creatives. That’s why we hosted an event at Central Saint Martins. We’re targeting students in the creative fields. Apple used to be this company that was for the creative community. There was this Mac versus PC, where creative people used Apple and other people used PCs. If we can genuinely become really useful to the creative community and foster and aid creativity in the next generation, then it’s logical that we can build that brand love and connection.
This generation is going to want something different from their parents. Anything your parents are doing is just not cool when you are younger. We can become part of helping the younger generation forge their own identity, particularly knowing that that’s a generation that is AI native. These people are growing up using chatGPT and Claude in their day-to-day. If we can harness those two things together, it could be really powerful.
Tell me about Nothing’s Paris Fashion Week effort.
There’s this French fashion influencer called Lyas. There was a season where he didn’t get invited to the Dior show, so he basically just messaged on Instagram saying, “I’m going to be watching it in this bar, come along.” And like 2,000 fashion students turned up. They pretty much shut down the street because there were so many people outside the bar. He realized he was onto something and the next season, created a natural schedule and worked with fashion brands to organize viewings of their shows. Each time, there were 2,000- 3,000 students coming to watch.
I was really interested in how he was democratizing the fashion show and making it feel more accessible to a new generation of creatives, which ties nicely with what we’re trying to do at Nothing. For the Couture Fashion Week in Paris, we partnered with him on the Dior Couture show. We designed T-shirts that said, “I went to the watch party and I left with nothing.” We had headphones underneath people’s seats as a kind of surprise and delight moment as well.
Can you talk about how the brand fits into culture?
I’m really interested in what is the off-schedule, counter-cultural thing to do. I don’t think Nothing would ever want to be the official sponsor of a big corporate event. It’s more like, where are the kids going to a rave? How can we get involved in that? How can we help them organize the rave? I think that’s the vibe.
How is Nothing standing out in the marketplace?
Apple uses iterative design. They start off with the latest phone or laptop and they’re like, how can we improve this? The Nothing design team tries to create something completely new each time. It’s not based on the last one. It’s a completely new thought. That’s a way more exciting way of designing.
Secondly, there’s a kind of retrofuturism to the design language, which creates an emotional connection. Having a screen on the back of this bitmap pixelated thing reminds you of Casio in the 1990s. Apple went in this very minimalist design direction that everyone copied. There’s an alternate vision for how things can be, which is a bit more fun, maximalist, playful.
From a software perspective, we’re trying to design things that aid your creativity and don’t just distract you for the sake of it. I personally have had that really bad problem that I go into my phone for a specific task, completely forget, end up spending an hour scrolling Instagram or reading my messages. I can’t even remember why I opened my phone in the first place. We’re trying to work towards a more conscious approach to digital technology. One of the points of having the little screen on the back is that you don’t need to flip your phone over because you receive essential notifications on the back.
There are young people who are embracing this disconnection of being offline.
Exactly, yeah. Quite a lot of people have created their own setups where it’s almost like a dumb phone, so you have hardly any visible widgets or apps on the screen. You just have the bare minimum. One of the things we definitely want to explore in the future is having more presets created by the community. When you first go into your phone, you can choose other people’s setups.
Can you talk about how you are engaging the community?
The community aspect is really important. We have this whole thing around transparency and co-creation and collaboration. We’re very open. We’re open to getting feedback from our community, we’re open to criticism. That’s very different to some of these legacy technology companies. We have a community board advisor who sits on our board to make sure that we’ve got the community’s interest in mind as we move forward. We launched our second community edition phone last year that was actually designed by our community. It had this retro 90s Game Boy feel to it.
I love the idea that the community broadens out and becomes people in tech, music and fashion – the next generation of creatives all together. We could do things in the future where we host competitions to find up-and-coming photographers who shoot campaigns for us.
Can you talk about how AI shows up in the consumer experience on the phone?
We’ve also talked about this future state, where we’re going to have more of an agentic OS where we move from this app-based model into something that’s truly personalized for you. There’s going to be a transition from this smartphone-based world to an AI phone-based world. Apple created the concept of apps with the App Store. And that’s now quite an old concept. I certainly, as a user, find it really annoying. I can’t remember if someone’s messaged me through iMessage, WhatsApp, email, Slack. When I try to find my flight, I can’t remember if it was British Airways, American Airlines.
This idea that you have a brain on your phone that’s your personal agent that’s collating this information together for you into what’s important will be pretty transformative. Whoever gets it right and does so in a unique, very personal way is going to win.
Can you talk about where people are buying your phones?
The way that we’ve scaled has mainly been through partners and channels. We’re also very excited about building out our DTC business. We have a store here in London. We just opened a flagship store in Bangalore in India. We have other stores planned this year in New York, Tokyo and San Francisco. Our e-commerce business is rapidly expanding as well.
We’re working on creating a pinnacle experience when you buy directly from the brand, which is going to be connected to how we build out this notion of community and collaboration. For example, in our store in Bangalore, there’s an area for content creation where people can just come in and make content for social media. Thinking of the stores as these community studio spaces is something really interesting as well.
Will there be a space for the community to create apps?
In this AI future that we’re heading towards, one of the key issues is around data security and privacy. Currently, everyone who’s using ChatGPT or Claude is basically sending so much personal information up into the cloud. We’re thinking about this alternative future where you can house your own personal data somewhere secure. And then basically it just sends to the cloud what’s necessary. You have your own personal repository. It’s almost like your own personal data bank.
Like paying a subscription as you would to Dropbox or Apple?
Yeah. Exactly.
Tell me about your background in luxury has helped you come create the marketing vision for Nothing.
When I joined Loewe, it had very low awareness outside of Spain and Japan. People didn’t really understand what it stood for as a brand. It was founded in 1846 as a collective of leather artisans. There was this idea of craft that was at the very core of the brand. A lot of luxury brands talk about craftsmanship, but we actually wanted to uplift this notion of craft more broadly, which we described as the joy of making things with your hands.
We had the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an annual creative prize. There were over 3,000 entries from all over the world, ranging from glass making, embroidery, ceramics, metal work, etc. There would be 30 finalists and one winner. Quite often we would end up working with those artists on collections and collaborations and stuff in our stores.
We also began celebrating people in their different fields – the craft of making music, the craft of film – and building this sense of culture around the brand. That was very different from other French luxury fashion brands which had no storytelling and focused on brand image. It was just the origin story of the brand, like Coco Chanel or Monsieur Dior, and then the savoir-faire of the products.
During those seven years, I learned how to connect to the zeitgeist, culture and build a meaningful community around a brand with a coherent point of view, things that I’m really excited to bring to Nothing. Nothing is perfectly positioned to be this cultural tech brand where no other tech companies really are. What was the last tech company that felt truly fashionable?
If you look at tech companies now, a lot of them are partnering with fashion brands to try and be more relevant. Google partnered with Warby Parker. Meta partnered with Ray-Ban and Oakley. OpenAI just announced a partnership on innovation with the CDFA in New York. Because Nothing is already positioned in this place of tech, fashion and music, we can do some of that stuff on our own. Then when we do collaborate, it can be with the up-and-coming creative community in fashion and music that we want to support and shine a light on, rather than leveraging people for their cultural clout.
