Attracted by this beautiful natural alarm clock from Fadtronics' booth last year in a gift show, I met Chris Ng, founder and designer. Our initial conversation was short but later encounters with him gave me a lot of confidence of Hong Kong design's future, talking about the next generation of designers being able to leverage Hong Kong's close proximity to China's factories, add design and packaging values AND successfully reach out to the world market's end users. Not like most of the designers, Chris masters exceptionally well both ends of supply chain yet never stop innovate and listen to customers. You feel like a good old friend with him in just a few minutes' chat.
When I saw his new products this year, I immediately fell in love with them and I'm sure they will sell like hot cakes. One of them is called Music Branch. Function as a splitter for multiple headphones (1 to 3 in this case) it is far more approachable and pleasing than the already top selling Belkin RockStar. I particularly like Chris' signature blue among other similarly tempting colors. Other than music sharing among friends, "imagine AV stores having trouble of all the ugly cables lying around connecting to dozens of demo speakers, this solves a retailer's display problem by adding a pleasant overall look", Chris said.
Another rendition of the same concept but for intimate music sharing is this heart shape splitter, guaranteed to be popular in Xmas and Valentine seasons. As a retailer, my sense immediately inspired some more product ideas stemming from this, which Chris already realized. His clients from Japan already placed orders and we are trying to rush the first batch to our stores during Back To School 2009 promotion.
If you follow this blog, you know I'm not writing here to sell. I just love what Chris does. I remember last year when the natural alarm clocks were delivered to our stores, he insisted to take back all the stocks because he was not satisfied with certain quality issues undetectable to a typical person. Two thumbs up Chris!
