Carl Pei calls his new company Nothing

A company announced before its first product

On 27 January 2021, Carl Pei names his new company. It is called Nothing, it is based in London, and it has no product to show.¹ Pei, born in Beijing in 1989, co-founded the smartphone maker OnePlus with Pete Lau in December 2013 and left it in October 2020.¹ The announcement consists of a name, a mission, a list of backers and the company's stated aim to "rethink everything".²

Pei prepares the moment with a joke. Before the reveal he tweets that he "might announce nothing in the end".³ The line only works because of the name. The company literally announces Nothing, and the double meaning turns the first piece of company news into the first piece of brand communication.

Why a technology company calls itself Nothing

The name arrives with its own explanation. In the launch statement, Pei writes:

"We believe that the best technology is beautiful, yet natural and intuitive to use. When sufficiently advanced, it should fade into the background and feel like nothing."²

The statement turns an empty word into a design promise. Nothing describes the ideal state of a product rather than the product itself: technology that recedes until the user stops noticing it. The mission puts the same idea in operational terms: "Nothing's mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future."⁴ A word that would sound like a void in most categories becomes, in this framing, a description of the goal.

Pei later tells a more casual story about the name. He had considered calling the company Stone or Next, and his younger sister, whom he describes as Gen Z, found his suggestions "cringe". He says he got "really upset" and answered: "I'm just going to call it Nothing." She liked it.⁵ The two accounts do not compete. One explains why the word fits the mission, the other shows that the name was chosen precisely because it does not sound like a technology company.

A mood instead of a product

The statement also positions the company against its own industry. "It's been a while since anything interesting happened in tech. It is time for a fresh breeze of change," Pei writes.⁴ That is a claim about the category, not about a device, and it gives Nothing a role before it has anything to sell: the newcomer that wants to make consumer technology interesting again. The announcement names a field, smart devices, but no product category, no specification and no launch date.^{2, 3} What it offers instead is an attitude, and the attitude is designed to be shared before anyone can judge a device.

Launching the name first reverses the usual order of brand building, in which a product creates the associations that a name later collects. Here the name, the tone and the promise come first, and the products will have to live up to them. Pei sets the bar himself. He says Nothing will use "custom made" components from the start and will not "relabel somebody else's products".⁶ The commitment matters because the brand, at this stage, consists of nothing but expectations.

Backers who stand for products and culture

The investors are part of the message. Among them are Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman and the YouTuber Casey Neistat.^{1, 6} They take part in an initial round of seven million dollars.⁷

The mix reads like a sketch of the intended audience. Fadell stands for consumer hardware that people remember, Lin, Huffman and Neistat for online communities and creator culture. For a company without a product, the names supply credibility, and they signal that Nothing intends to address communities as much as customers.

Design as a founding partner

Four weeks later, on 24 February 2021, Nothing names the Stockholm company Teenage Engineering as a founding partner.⁸ Founded in 2010 and best known for its OP-1 synthesizer, Teenage Engineering sends its co-founder and chief executive Jesper Kouthoofd to Nothing as creative lead, while its vice head of design, Tom Howard, becomes Nothing's head of design.^{9, 8} According to Pei, the collaboration has produced a "product roadmap" that is "true to the company's vision".⁹

The partner fills in what the name leaves open. A brand whose promise is technology that feels like nothing borrows its design credibility from a studio Nothing praises for "products for people who love sound, music, and design".⁹ Kouthoofd announces that "we will have something exciting to show to the world".⁸ The first product follows in July 2021: the Ear (1) earbuds, with a transparent design.⁷ A company named after the absence of things makes its first object see-through, and the name finally has something to describe.