With IoT gadgets booming in the market, building a smart home is pretty easy these days, it seems like every home appliances such as refrigerator, speaker, lighting fixture, and dryer-washing machine are all cloud-connected, and easy to control on your smartphone.
The home monitoring camera category came in early in this trend to prevent break-ins and avoid damage from unusual activities. With this oversaturated market, few brands have the opportunity to stand out from the competition, and one of them is Beyese – a free-motion camera that earned multiple awards for its sleek design.
Beseye was founded by Shaq Tu and his lab partners from school. After graduation, some of them worked in IC design companies, and others were coworkers at MediaTek, the world’s 4th largest semiconductor company in Taiwan. The team has a vision to make smart home products more accessible. With this vision in mind, they created Beseye and hope the product could help people live more simply with the help of technology, and spend more time on human connections.
Turning a Failed Pitch to Award Winning Product
Beseye wants to leverage AI and IoT to overcome people’s perception of the traditional home surveillance camera, which gives a cold and machine-like feel. However, despite the team’s creativity and professional skills, the company is considered small and unknown so their prototype got rejected by most of the factories in the beginning. Luckily, one factory was moved by the teams’ enthusiastic, and together, they created the first prototype of Beseye.
Soon after the prototype was in production, Beseye won the iF, Red Dot, Good Design and other design awards, which was a big encouragement for the team. Besides the superb product design, the product’s implementation of voice recognition AI has also surpassed the competitors in the market, users can easily set up the camera with voice control.
Invented A Great Product, But it’s Not Selling
“After a long period of software developing and product design, we finally got the product manufactured. However, no one recognizes us at all.” Said Sandy and Yvonne, both in the marketing team at Beseye.
In the beginning, Beseye seeks media channels for press exposure and opportunities of partnership, at the meanwhile, they worked with an eCommerce agency to help them run and manage their online product channel. After half a year, the team has gradually expanded its sales into offline channels. In addition, attending trade shows and promotional events also gave them a chance to create dialogues with consumers and get a closer look for their needs.
Til now, Beyese has partnered with more than 20 offline channels across Taiwan to increase customer experience with product demonstrations and on-site customer support.
Different Strategies for Online and Offline Channels
Beseye’s strategy for their physical store is to provide great customer experience with product demonstration and instant customer service. As for its online channel, Beseye aims to provide a brand image that connects with customers on an emotional level. With many surveillance camera brands in the market, Beseye could be overlooked in the competitive landscape. In order for Beseye to stand out from the crowd, they must showcase how the product differentiates itself with others. The team soon realize if they keep selling their products on marketplace platforms without getting a brand website, they’re unable to give the brand its own personality, look, feel, and tone.
Provide Speedy Customer Support on Brand Website
Now, with its own website, Beseye has the opportunity to receive first-hand customer feedback.
These collected feedbacks are great inputs to Beseye’s future product development and allow the company to improve its product to deliver a better customer experience. In addition, the company also gets to know more about its user’s need.
Finding New Audiences and Expand to New Markets Through Customer Feedback
With a well-rounded understanding of its customers, the company’s growth has reflected in its sales and customer feedback. Beseye’s customer service team has found out a lot of users would share images of their pet being captured on the camera, and realized a large scale of users bought the product for looking after their pet when they’re off to work. Based on the number provided by Taiwan’s Directorate-General of Budget, Account, and Statistics, Executive Yuan: In 2015, at least 1 in every 3 families has either a dog or a cat. Realizing there’s another market aside from childcare cameras, the team also went after the pet industry, and revised the ad’s copy and visual to attract pet owners.
As the pet market continues to expand and become more competitive, Beseye wants to position itself as an AI camera, instead of features like treat toss or doubling as a floor cleaning robot. They want Beseye to have AI face recognition to notify the pet owner when other family members have arrived home, and automatically record the pet’s precious moments when Beseye detects the pet facing the camera.
Future Implement: Analyze traffic flow, customer behavior, and customer flow in retails
Beseye aims to bring AI-enabled cameras into retail and physical stores, besides the use of store surveillance on criminal or suspicious behavior. Beseye wants to leverage AI-enabled camera to track and record customer information of different store branch accordingly, such as buyers’ sex ratio, age, shoppers’ path, how long they stayed in front of a shelf, and more. These collected data could be useful in business decisions and transform customers’ retail experience.
Editor Notes:
Although Beseye had a bumpy journey and faced a lot of execution challenges all along the way, the team always seem to find ways to address these problems. From working with an agency to build its own online brand store with SHOPLINE. Beseye realized the importance of getting full control of marketing strategy and market management by having its own site. In addition, getting first-hand customer feedback is also precious, it helped the company to expand to new markets and improved its brand message.
Shaq, Co-Founder of Beseye, mentioned he’s looking forward to the future with more advanced AI technology and IoT implements, he also thinks Beseye, the cloud-based AI camera would have a bright future and develop to different usages in many settings.
