What do Wyze’s new health products say about the company?

This week, I unpacked the Wyze Scale and Wyze Band, both recently released by Wyze Labs, the company behind a groundbreaking $19.99 connected camera. Wyze is well known in the industry for delivering quality connected devices at a surprisingly low cost. The founders, which come from Amazon, have built the business selling low-margin devices at high volumes. The plan is that cheap IoT devices will drive user adoption and, by extension, Wyze’s sales.

The new health products are in line with this plan, with Wyze charging $19.99 plus shipping for the scale, and $24.99 plus shipping for the activity tracker. After playing around with both for a few days I’m realizing I may have been focusing too much on the low-margin/high-volume aspect of Wyze’s business while failing to see the real innovation. Wyze’s two new products make it clear that not only has Wyze done a good job building a low-margin, high volume IoT device business, but that it fundamentally understands what it takes to build a connected product and a connected business.

First up, a bit about each product based on a few days of testing. I’ll start with the scale, because it highlights what I find so compelling about Wyze’s business model. At $19.99, the Bluetooth scale can track weight, body fat percentage, and a dozen other parameters such as the percentage of visceral fat, muscle, bone mass, and basal metabolic rate. It’s a sleek product packed with powerful features at an impossible price. Similar products — such as the Fitbit Aria, the QuardioBase, and the Withings scales — retail for between $99.95 and $129.99.

To be fair, those scales also have a Wi-Fi chip, not just Bluetooth, which means your phone doesn’t need to be nearby to get data from them. Personally, since my husband and I are about the same weight, we each have to have our phones with us when we step on the Wyze scale so it “knows” whose measurements it has. That’s because it tracks who is on the scale based on their weight, and so will update our apps when our phones pass within range of the scale.

For the price, I unequivocally recommend this product to people, because the software experience is excellent, the features are robust, and the lack of a Wi-Fi chip is really only going to bother folks who have previously invested in connected scales and have expectations about how they should behave. For most, the Wyze scale will be the first connected scale they will buy, because it costs just a bit more than a regular digital scale but has so many other features.

According to Dave Crosby, a co-founder and the head of marketing at Wyze, there was a lot of debate over the scale’s pricing, and the margins are very tight. But the company really wanted to reach the sub-$20 price tag, and apparently figured out a way to do that. And I think they will sell a lot of these things, opening up the market for new users to the Wyze product ecosystem and bringing more people into the connected home fold.

But while the Wyze Scale shows just how well the company understands the world of building connecting products, I found the Wyze Band to be less impressive. At $24.99, it’s cheap, but there are other cheap fitness trackers out there that will count steps, track heart rate, and monitor sleep. Its two distinguishing characteristics are a color AMOLED screen (very pretty) and the fact that it uses a Bluetooth connection to your phone to let you address Amazon’s Alexa. It also lets you control your Wyze home devices using shortcuts on the watch face.

There’s nothing on the market that does all of that for the same price. As a dedicated user of Fitbit from back in 2011 (I’m currently on a Fitbit Charge 3), I can’t say the Wyze Band offers much competition as an activity tracker. It’s overgenerous when tracking sleep. The heart rate sensor doesn’t work well when I’m working out, and the step counting is off compared to my Fitbit, especially when I’m walking indoors.

But if I look at this as a pedometer that lets me talk to Alexa from any room and acts as a wearable remote for my Wyze smart home gear, this becomes an interesting product. I’m in lockdown right now, so I don’t often find myself in a location where I need Alexa and the assistant isn’t there. But in the car, it might be a good way to get my random questions answered, because the Echo Auto was a wretched experience. And in homes that don’t have an Echo in every room, it could prove useful.

Yes, you do have to have your phone within Bluetooth range for this to work, but the connection has proven stable and the lag isn’t bad. It’s easy to get the Alexa prompt on the screen, so I’d rather turn to this device instead of my phone, even if it’s nearby. That said, I find the shortcuts to control my Wyze smart home devices a bit more awkward to get to, so I’m less likely to use them.

So for the same price as an Echo Auto, I now have an Echo in a wrist band. One day I will likely have Google in the Wyze Band, too. And I expect the device’s step and heart rate tracking will get better as the algorithms improve. That is the second key to Wyze’s success, I think. The company doesn’t look at its products as finished. Instead, it constantly solicits feedback and updates the devices in an attempt to give users what they ask for.

Such an approach is a huge change from the way companies have traditionally built products for the home. Because Wyze is willing to view each product as an ongoing relationship with each customer, tweaking the products over time, that means it’s willing to invest in software development for the life of a product and establish regular communication with customers.

And because the devices are relatively inexpensive, when Wyze launches new features that aren’t supported by an older generation (as happened with the original camera), customers don’t get too upset about upgrading. Meanwhile, plenty of established home brands have struggled when launching connected products as they try to budget for the costs associated with running in the cloud, providing continuing software support, and managing new databases of customer data. They don’t put much focus on launching new features.

But that will change, and when companies are ready to rethink what it means to offer a product and need successful examples to emulate, Wyze is a good place to start. On that note, I know the scale and tracker I purchased are going to change over the coming years, and they’re likely to get better.