Tinsel Headphones

I first became aware of Tinsel via social media a few months ago when a preview image of the brand-new wearable tech company’s first product crossed my social media path. What I saw looked like a superfly necklace, but the description said I was looking at headphones, and I was intrigued.

The Dipper audio necklace is the inaugural Tinsel item, and the sleek chevron design conceals earbuds that provide premium sound quality through the industry-standard 3.5mm audio connector. It presently comes in two color options (gold/silver and gunmetal/silver), and it also has a microphone and three button control for making calls or yelling at Siri or whatever you would ordinarily do with your headset.

I went from intrigue to fascination when I reached out and learned that Tinsel’s founder and CEO Aniyia Williams is a 29-year old Black woman, and I had the opportunity to sit down with the San Francisco-based visionary when she visited New York last week. Aniyia’s story of creating Tinsel is truly inspiring. She had been working as a part-time office manager at a company that makes a messaging app for smartphones, and rose in the ranks there to lead their marketing team, and while she enjoyed the atmosphere and the opportunities she had there, she wasn’t as fulfilled as she would have liked.

She had a passing idea about how to solve the problems she encountered daily in the constant use of headphones. Like many of us, Aniyia uses her headphones “all the time,” for phone calls, general communication, listening to music, and even learning it—she’s also a classically trained opera singer.

Aniyia pointed to her bag, which she described as a “gigantic black hole” but which was actually a lovely tote full of essentials just like what many of us carry every day, and said, “I was just super irritated that my headphones would always get buried at the bottom of my bag. Every time I wanted to use them, I was digging around for them, and when I found them I was untangling them for five minutes. Or my husband would take them thinking they were his, they would get lost, they would get worn out; I was buying several pairs a year. I thought it would be so much easier if I could just wear these on my body, but without them looking like headphones, because I spend too much time putting an outfit together to have it downgraded by plastic wires.”

Aniyia continued, “I thought to myself ‘someone has to have made this thing,’ and so I looked, but couldn’t find it anywhere.” The thought remained just a thought until she was reading about the launch of the Apple watch while on a flight last year. She says, “I started to think about other wearables, Fitbit was really just hitting the mainstream, and I thought maybe I should revisit this idea in the back of my head.”

Like many other ambitious and impactful ventures, Tinsel began with Aniyia quitting her job. In a bold move, as she was on her way out, she convinced the CEO of the app development company to make an initial financial investment in what would become Tinsel. He offered introductions to industry experts that Aniyia could learn from and eventually partner with, and her drive to take that first seed money and get to a point where the Dipper is mass-production-ready comes to fruition today with the launch of the Tinsel Indiegogo campaign.

Video by Dutton Films.

When she began Tinsel, Aniyia says “It was on trust and faith. I had the idea, but I had no idea how to do it, no background in manufacturing and making a tangible thing, let alone an electronic thing. To stretch those first dollars as far as possible has been a challenge, so I looked to people that I know and I called in a lot of favors. Anyone who has a skill that I can use, and they will lend it to me for free or very cheaply, I’m all about it.” Spoken like a true boss. One friend in particular really gave Aniyia the final push to break through the inevitable self-doubt that precedes such an endeavor, and that friend is now running the business and operations end of Tinsel. A friend from college happens to be a branding superstar who could help with the meticulously thought out marketing elements, and Aniyia even brought in her father to help with sales strategies.

She knows how fortunate she is to have had the backing of her former boss, whose introductions to manufacturers led to her meeting the Dipper’s industrial designer, also a young woman of color, who’s done design work in a wide range of fields, from electronics to her own line of clutches, to NASA. NASA!

Aniyia told me, “At first, we had this idea that we could pull together the technical co-founder, the creative person, the business person, and we’re just gonna build this team and we’re gonna be scrappy and do this thing, and I think that works for a lot of people. For us, we found that we could optimize our momentum by working with people who are professionals, and because of that first investment, we were able to shift our resources to do it that way, and it was a better decision for us. It allowed us to move more quickly and to have partners who knew what they were doing instead of just feeling around in the dark.”

In other words, having an idea is great and having supportive people is fantastic, but to really make that idea come to fruition, professional knowledge and expertise are necessary. You may not have it, and that’s fine, but someone else out there does and it’s a good idea to learn from those who are successfully doing the thing that you want to do.

Speaking more specifically about the Dipper audio necklace, Aniyia tells me that she was intent on learning from those who came before her because, as she says, “We’re choosing something that is not new technology. Headphones have been around for decades, and that’s why we really believe in starting here with this product. The future that I want for this company is to be making lots of different kinds of tech jewelry for women, all with different designs, different collections, and different functionalities, and starting with the headphones makes sense because it’s something that we know is proven and tested.”

Aniyia says, “Thinking about wearables in general, I use some myself, and we have to consider things that are nice to have vs. things that are need to have. In some cases, the wearable either hasn’t fully demonstrated its purpose in your life, or it’s trying to alter the way you live your life. I’ve had two Fitbits so far, and used them each for maybe a week. I’m just not into working out—it didn’t fit for me because I don’t care how many steps I take, and I’m not interested in increasing them. For some people, that’s great and it motivates them, but for me it’s like it was trying to change some facet of my life that I’m not really ready to change. Headphones, on the other hand, are a demonstrated need that compliments the things that are always at your fingertips: your tablet, your phone, your laptop. There’s a hole in consumer electronics, which is designing products with women in mind. Women are relegated to getting a pink version of an item, or leopard print, and that’s it.”

At this point in our conversation I was waving my church fan at this good word, as I happen to be against randomly leopard-print electronics and other such lady-fied versions of products as overly gendered deviations from the thing as it exists in the first place. The message there is that men are the default consumer. Designing a piece of wearable tech jewelry specifically for women is not the same as slapping some pink polka dots on your already-made product.

Aniyia looks at those girly electronics and says, “No, we can do better than that, and women deserve better. Women are massive consumers of electronics and we always have our technology in hand, and I want to think about the way that women think about utility. I think that men think about utility in a way of does it work: does it [do X thing it’s supposed to do], with less regard to style.”

Indeed, even the most stylish of men will still defer to a speaker or headphones that could look any which way, or ones that look the way Apple and Beats told them they should look, with little deviation. Individual style takes a backseat to status, and we’re left with homogenized items on our bodies and in our hands, when those things could just as easily be treated as stylish accessories.

I have a personal hatred of the current popular Bluetooth headphones design that looks like a plastic ring that sits around one’s neck and has earbuds attached. Living in New York City, every third person I pass on the street and every other person at the gym is wearing these hideous things in a variety of colors, and indeed my recent shopping excursions to replace my headphones revealed that this is the prevailing design on the market, and it was incredibly difficult to find headphones that were not Beats and didn’t look like a plastic collar to indicate that you’ll be in the first herd of humans to be rounded up when the aliens come.

I feel like it’s horrific to be a grown adult with this plastic ring around your neck, and I think it’s inappropriate for SO many people to be wearing something of essentially the same design. I’m deliberate about what I wear, and I don’t want anything on me that I specifically didn’t choose to put on me that day. The things that we choose to put on our bodies say something about us. Every item makes a statement and personally, I don’t want that statement to be ‘I went to Best Buy just like everyone else.’ I don’t want to be a sheep.

Of course that’s the exact opposite of the Cool Kids Herd Mentality propagated by Apple, and I want to make it clear that my disdain for that sort of thing is purely my opinion, and didn’t come from Aniyia. She more gracefully said “I gotta give Beats props across the board,” and yet we both agree that we don’t want to walk around looking like a DJ.

Just as we’re more prone to multi-tasking than our brethren, women tend to consider utility in multiple layers. Aniyia says, “We need it to do what it’s supposed to do, of course. But also, how does it make me feel? How does this fit into the scheme of all the other things I already own that I’m going to wear?”

As far as functionality, I got to try out a Dipper prototype and Drake and Future sounded fantastic in my ears. Some of the other, ahem, options out there don’t have the greatest track records for pure functionality, but the Tinsel team is determined to not go so far in the direction of style and design that the sound quality becomes an afterthought. Great headphones that are gorgeous still need to sound great, and these do.

Tinsel made the conscious decision to make their first audio necklace a wired design, which I admit surprised me until Aniyia succinctly said “Who’s gonna be mad about something you don’t have to charge? You just plug it in and it works.” I almost screamed in agreement at that, because part of my morning that very day had included what can only be described as a classic French farce of me turning on my Bluetooth headphones, un-pairing, syncing, and connecting in the settings fields of my two tablets, two laptops, and smartphone until the right ones were connected to the right device, only to have the battery poop out on me before the first song I was listening to was over. I’m fairly good about keeping my stuff charged, but as technology advances and we have more (wonderful) opportunities to utilize it, charging our miraculous items and keeping them powered becomes an increasing challenge. Nine times out of ten I end up using my wired headphones anyway.

Aniyia and her team are definitely working on a Bluetooth necklace design as well, specifically looking to make the charging as seamless as possible. She says, “I don’t want someone to have to think about the act of charging a piece of jewelry. That’s not what jewelry is. It should be something very natural.”

Tinsel is working on optimizing that charging conundrum, and they’re even looking into energy harvesting, where your own exertion powers your device, although that technology isn’t at a viable place yet anywhere on the market.

Still, the Dipper began as a thought and roughly a year later here I was wearing one around my neck. Indeed, Aniyia is looking forward to thinking about other places on the body to design for, also trying to incorporate wallet essentials into wearable to lessen the amount of things we’re carrying. Hinting at a very ambitious future project, Aniyia also told me she’s interested in “devices to tell women specifically what’s going on with their bodies,” but we’ll have to say tuned to see exactly how that fascinating idea manifests itself.

You can order your own Dipper right now, here. You can also support Tinsel at varying levels and be a part of what is surely a game-changing women-led company, at the ground level. Aniyia, who by the way is launching this company while six months pregnant, implores, “Let’s take things that are aesthetically pleasing and give those utility. Let’s redefine utility by giving those things qualities that are not only functional, but beautiful as well. That’s where I see this going. The audio necklace is just the start…I’m just gonna go, and I’m gonna keep going until someone tells me that I cannot go any more, until I hit an impossible obstacle. I’m gonna see how far I can take this.”

Very far, no doubt.

All images used with kind permission of Tinsel, professional photography by Thomas Kuoh

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