Marketing a new smart watch or wearable band is typically an exercise in trying to outdo a competitor in specifications and features. The wearables market has been a battleground of whose watch has a faster processor, better battery life, more appealing watch face, and so on. Sony decided to take the viral route by “crowdfunding” an e-ink-based watch without releasing the fact that it was actually behind the effort. According to a Sony spokesperson who spoke to the WSJ, “we hid Sony’s name because we wanted to test the real value of the product, whether there will be demand for our concept."

The watch was originally announced by a company called Fashion Entertainments, and highlighted a fashionable, e-paper-based set of wearables. The FES Watch is designed to change colors at the touch of a button. In addition, the announcement video showed several e-paper concepts that not only used monochrome color schemes but different colors as well.

The fashion aspect is that not only will the e-paper have different colors and patterns, but the colors can be changed by using an NFC-based smartphone that would allow users to change the color scheme on the fly. For example, while the announcement relates to a watch, the announcement video also had a number of different form factors that used e-paper. For example, glasses that could be re-colored and re-patterned with the tap of a smartphone or shoes that would change color and pattern with each step.