Over the last few years covering tech, headphone and smartphone maker Nothing has always stood out to me as a bit of an outlier. In 2020, Swedish-born founder Carl Pei dared to launch a challenger smartphone out of London, 13 years after Apple’s iPhone first dropped. Consumer tech hardware is an industry that requires scale to succeed, and Pei could have built Nothing out of larger markets like the US or China. But he chose London for its design and brand-positioning potential, in a move that seems to be paying off.
Nothing’s growth has accelerated in the last two years, with revenues increasing 150% to over $500 million in 2024. Pei says the company is on track to hit $1 billion in sales for 2025, and has collectively sold seven million of its headphones, earbuds and smartphones since launch. In September, Nothing was valued at $1.3 billion in a $200 million funding round led by early Facebook backer Tiger Global. Investors are backing its plans to double down on growth in the US in 2026 and invest in building “new form factors and software” involving AI, Pei tells me.
Nothing’s audio products are its bestsellers in the US, France, Germany and Australia, where it’s reached a 2.5% market share. India is its biggest market for smartphones, where it’s gained a 2% market share. In the global scheme of things, this is minute. But, when we meet at the design studio in Nothing’s North London HQ, Pei explains how he is doubling down on growth to transform the business from an “if-you-know-you-know” European challenger brand to the the younger generations’ most-beloved tech power, globally.
Pei is also keen to infiltrate culture. In the last year, the company has sponsored concept store openings, while its headphones are increasingly hooked around bagstraps at fashion parties. They also appeared on the runways of Marie Lueder and Jane Wade’s Spring/Summer 2026 fashion shows in London and New York, respectively.
Vogue Business can exclusively reveal that he’s hired ex-Loewe CMO Charlie Smith to take those fashion plans even further. Smith will join Nothing’s executive team as chief brand officer in January next year, overseeing the company’s global brand, image, marketing, communications and store design. He spent seven years at the Spanish luxury house, and was instrumental in forming the tongue-in-cheek TikTok strategy that transformed the brand from a craft-led heritage label into a buzzy, Gen Z-favorite luxury house.
“I think a lot of fashion brands and technology companies have been taking themselves a bit too seriously,” Smith says. “But I think through this idea of challenging the status quo, Nothing has this opportunity to be the brand for the next generation who wants to have fun expressing their personalities through the tech they use.”
Connecting to Gen Z
With prices ranging between £239 and £799 for its smartphones and £299 for its Headphone (1), Nothing’s tech is more affordable than that of its larger rivals. This is something that’s resonating particularly well among Gen Z, which is also its main audience. Nothing’s average customer is 26 years old.
This has been no accident. The company’s current mission statement is “to make tech fun, and inspire human creativity” — two things Pei, who was born in 1989, says Apple did for him in the aughts, but then lost as it scaled. “I was thinking, who is actually inspiring the next generation right now? Today, perhaps for the youth, Apple feels more like Microsoft when I was younger, like this big corporation.”
Strategically, Pei says that launching an iPhone alternative in 2020 makes it hard to sell to people of his own millennial generation, who grew up with Apple and have strong brand loyalty. But he saw an opportunity among Gen Zs, who might not have the same brand affinity and are therefore easier to convince to switch. “Our consumer age data shows we’re on track to deliver this, so now that gives us the confidence to double down on this audience,” he says. “We’re still a challenger brand and trying to gain market share, so we’ve got to be focused on a specific group of consumers.”
It makes sense, then, that Pei has hired another millennial who’s made a name for himself driving brand growth through Gen Z. “The number one marketing rule is to be where your audience is, so if we know that we want to target Gen Z, we need to show up authentically in the spaces they’re spending their time,” Smith says.
It’s highly likely, then, that we’ll soon see Nothing appear much more on social media, especially TikTok. Smith says he sees it as an entertainment platform where brands should dare to poke fun at themselves — the jokes around a brand called Nothing, he says, therefore write themselves.
Engaging the creative community
Pei is keen to make me understand that Nothing is focused on aesthetics as much as tech. Apparently, the company published a visual inspiration book, before it made any tech products. “It was as an exploration of all the things we drew inspiration from — movies, electronics, architecture and furniture,’ he explains. “The intention with the book was to set the tone for the brand for the next five years, so that all our designs would fit within the same vision.”
We’re sitting in what feels like the spatial embodiment of that brand vision book in the design wing of Nothing’s office. Industrial shelves are chaotically stacked with OG Gameboys, Apple’s first iMac and a 1985 Sinclair C5 electric tricycle is wedged beneath a workbench. It’s clear the brand’s designers draw inspiration from these vintage gadgets — Nothing’s smartphones, headphones and earbuds have a very distinctive design. They’re as futuristic as they are nostalgic, and characterized by an inside-out feeling, with some inner workings on show. It’s a statement to be wearing Nothing’s over-ear headphones, which, with only a 2.5% market share, can comfortably be described as niche.
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In July, Nothing chose to partner with fashion photographer Jordan Hemingway — a longtime collaborator of FKA Twigs — for its headphone release campaign. Hemingway, Lueder and Wade are not mainstream fashion collaborators — every choice so far is sending a calculated “if-you-know-you-know” message, or as Smith puts it: “Nothing has built a brand that signals having their products means you’re a bit rebellious or you’re going against the status quo, and that’s vital to maintain as the brand grows.”
Pei is proud of the fact that 10% of Nothing’s customers work in creative fields. He plans to increasingly target this group, who he believes have been “neglected over time” by larger tech brands. Inspired by Apple’s creative tools like Garage Band and iMovie, Pei says that Nothing is now building software that “enhances creative workflows”, in addition to its hardware range.
One of the new investors that joined Nothing’s funding round in September was Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of one of the biggest AI chipmakers in the world. This was a strategic investment, with Pei adding that Nothing will use some of the fresh funds to design AI products — both devices and software — for consumers.
Pei says Nothing is working on improving its inter-device connectivity and AI that enables its products to capture context, so that something you hear, say or see that’s captured by a Nothing product can “flow seamlessly from one device to another”, within a software system bespoke to each consumer.
Yet, there is a trust crisis within creative communities when it comes to brands openly using AI. Perhaps nowhere is this stronger than within the fashion industry, where brands’ early attempts to use AI for creative campaigns have so far been met with trepidation.
Smith is cognisant of this. “I think we’re not really talking, certainly for luxury fashion brands, about a situation where AI is going to be replacing human creativity,” he says. “So I think the key has got to be as much openness and transparency as possible, to bring people in on the journey. I want to show them that actually, AI can be beneficial for the creative process.”
Smith argues that fashion companies are all already using AI a lot, even if they’re reluctant to admit it. “Most fashion companies would probably have over 20 different AI projects live right now, from supply chain optimization, through to visual prototypes replacing photoshop,” he says. “These are all, to me, ways of aiding creativity.”
A future of interdisciplinary collabs — and robots
Nothing released Essential Space in March, its first software product, built alongside the launch of its Nothing Phone (3a), which is designed to make organizing content across its devices easier for creative work. The AI-powered feature allows users to save visual inspiration from social posts they’ve seen or from photos of the world around them, summarize brainstorming meetings, and create to-do lists synced with calendars, bypassing several manual steps.
“A lot of technology today is designed to distract you from life and from creativity, and to suck up your time,” Smith adds. “I love the idea of creating a technology company that aids your creativity, rather than distracting you from it. “Nothing’s what you have before you have something — that’s a really interesting thing to play on.”
He also underlines the importance of a multichannel marketing strategy that prioritizes Gen Z’s craving for IRL community, through more events and interdisciplinary collaborations. “I think today, the best way to grow a business is by building a community and a world around the brand,” says Smith, outlining his plans to position Nothing as “an authentic voice in the music community”, and work with different music artists, events and publications.
At Loewe, Smith worked under the creative direction of Jonathan Anderson, who gained a reputation for fusing the worlds of fashion and art through several projects collaborating with or platforming artists, from Lara Favaretto to Richard Hawkins.
“What I’ve learned during the last seven years in fashion is this idea of really placing a brand in culture,” he says. “Music is only one — we can do the same thing in fashion, in design, in architecture, in art. I feel like all of these communities are becoming much more interconnected. If you look at the art world and the fashion world, they used to be quite separate, and now they’ve become more and more enmeshed.”
Nothing has dipped its toes directly into fashion, through two stunt-related drops of its own streetwear-style clothing brand, Nothing Apparel, in 2023 and 2024. This fashion focus would lend itself nicely to AI wearables in the future, but Pei gives no clues as to what form Nothing’s future AI devices will take.
“We’re excited to participate in the industry exploration alongside Meta with glasses and OpenAI with Jony Ive’s Io, to find new form factors in the years to come,” Pei says. “One day, Nothing’s AI devices will just become physical manifestations of human intelligence.”
