Kazam

» see kazam.mobi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Michael Coombes ran HTC's UK sales and James Atkins ran its UK marketing, and in 2013 they left to put a British name on phones of their own. The vehicle was a dormant company in Marlow, Buckinghamshire: Scotrex Technology Ltd, incorporated on 10 January 2013, renamed Kazam Mobile Limited on 11 June. The Register wrote them up a week after that, and the first handsets were shown in August.

Kazam did not build phones. Most of what it sold was a Gionee design rebadged for Europe, which was ordinary practice at that end of the market and not something the company hid especially hard. What it sold instead was aftercare. Every Kazam came with a year of free screen replacement. That sounds like a thin thing to lead a campaign on until you notice that cracked glass is how most phones actually die, and that at a hundred pounds the repair quote tends to exceed what the handset is worth.

It went on sale in five European countries: the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Poland. Turkey was never on that list, and a brand whose entire proposition was a service promise could not travel to a country where it had no service, so there was nothing here to miss. I knew the name only because the British tech press covered it like a plucky national project.

~ the record ~

~ the rescue ~

The flagship was the Tornado 348, which at 5.15mm was briefly the thinnest phone anybody was selling. It was also 3G only, in the year 4G stopped being a luxury, and that single decision aged the whole range in about eighteen months.

The fix was the Tornado 552L, a rebadged Gionee Elife S7 with a bigger screen and the missing radio. It was shown off at Mobile World Congress with great confidence and then canceled in October 2015 without ever reaching shops. Kazam's stand at that show had grown from brief meetings held next to the prayer room and the toilets in 2014 to a hall fixture a year later.

~ the advert ~

The marketing took over. A Kazam television commercial was banned by the Advertising Standards Authority, which called it sexually suggestive and likely to cause serious offense. Tulisa Contostavlos was signed as brand ambassador and then tweeted from an iPhone. The company turned a slim profit in 2015 and a net loss of nearly 3 million pounds in 2016, attributed largely to advertising and marketing spend, which is the entire story of the company in one accounting line.

~ the receivers ~

Companies House has the ending at day precision. Administrators were appointed on 18 April 2017, Simon Bonney and Andrew Hosking acting jointly. That administration ran until 23 April 2018, when it converted into a creditors' voluntary liquidation with the same two practitioners, and dissolution followed on 9 June 2020. The last accounts filed were made up to 31 January 2016, so the final full year was never published.

Coolsmartphone went looking for the company in January 2018 and found the Wikipedia page still describing a going concern while the register said otherwise, noting that all the administrator had to sell was a quantity of spare parts for which there was no buyer. Coombes went on to run Wileyfox, the other phone brand under the same owner, which failed in its turn. Atkins went to Tesla. kazam.mobi answers today with an unrelated phone-news blog that describes itself on its own About page as an independent tech media website.

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