KANOA

» see getkanoa.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

KANOA opened pre-orders on 31 August 2015 for a pair of true wireless earbuds, at a hundred and fifty dollars against an eventual list price several times that. This was a month before anybody had seen AirPods, so the category was still an open question and the company was selling an answer to it. The San Francisco outfit behind it, founded by Cival Van Der Lubbe, took the orders directly through its own Shopify store rather than through Kickstarter or Indiegogo, which meant no platform rules and no platform arbitration.

What the money bought was two years of updates. The first year went into a feasibility study and a design from an outside engineering firm, and ended with the admission that the product was not good enough to make. The second year was a restart with an in-house team. Through all of it the company posted a progress note every Thursday. That is the most sympathetic fact in the story: whatever else was going wrong, somebody sat down weekly and wrote to the people who had paid.

In mid-August 2017 the first units finally shipped and the app went into the App Store. Then a reviewer who had been sent a pair, along with five hundred dollars, published a video saying these were the worst headphones at that price he had used, and said on camera that he had been offered money for a favorable one. Within a week the investors KANOA was closing a round with pulled out. On 24 August the store disappeared behind a password gate, and the gate itself carried the letter.

~ the case file ~

~ dear backers ~

It is addressed to backers, it runs through the two years in order, and it is honest about the specific mechanism that killed the company. KANOA let anyone cancel and take a refund at any time, unlike a crowdfunding platform where the money is committed. The letter calls that policy the thing that kept them honest, then says plainly that it also left them exposed once they had made large financial commitments against orders that could evaporate. Bad publicity stirred the audience, and the investors read the room and left.

The closing section says no further pre-orders will be fulfilled and all employees have been let go, so customer support and the social accounts are unattended. Then: we are emotionally overwhelmed.

~ twenty five ~

The number that followed the company around afterward came out in the reporting: the contract manufacturer had assembled twenty five pairs. Against that sat an order book running into the tens of thousands, and buyers who had been waiting since 2015 and had watched the shipping confirmation emails go out days before the shutdown notice. Some got their money back by refusing to stop asking.

Others organized on Facebook and looked into a class action. A local paper called the whole thing the Fyre Festival of wireless earbuds.

~ what the archive caught ~

The last ordinary capture of getkanoa.com is 21 August 2017, with a working blog whose newest post is titled Yes, we're shipping. The next one, on 24 August, is the password page with the letter on it. One crawl in between was triggered by someone clicking a link with a Mailchimp campaign ID still attached to it, which is how the archive preserved the fact that the notice went out as an email blast to the list before anyone found it on the site. By 4 September the storefront was returning Shopify's unavailable-shop error, and it never came back.

~ the version that arrived here instead ~

True wireless earbuds reached Turkey as a finished product rather than as a promise. AirPods, then the cheap copies of AirPods, and by then nobody needed a two-year wait explained to them. The people who paid KANOA in 2015 were buying a year of engineering they had no way to inspect, from a company with no obligation to show them anything, and the only reason we know as much as we do about how it went wrong is that the founder wrote it down on his way out the door.

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