You may not have owned an Elvis presley radio product, but you will most likely see this classic, retro and versatile product around you or on social networks, it is a real crowdfunding explosion, but also the first generation of Little Red Book Internet celebrities, or a rebirth of decades of radio complex. It comes from a post-50s entrepreneur, Zeng Dejun.
▲ Elvis Presley The Little Prince
You may not have owned an xog mechanical optical range cube speaker, there is a small probability that it will brush this avant-garde, complex and tough product on a tide play shop, or vibrato, it is a combination of speakers, fingertip tops, rgb lamp strips and flashlights, but also a tide play that serves vision, hearing and touch, or a reflection on the future and youth. It also comes from a post-50s entrepreneur, Zeng Dejun.
▲ xog mechanical optical cube speaker
xog is a new brand of Elvis Presley, and unlike the "quality, mood" keyword of the Elvis brand, its keyword is "cyber audio, technology, tide play". There are more brands with similar styles on the market than xog, but in my opinion, the reason why it is special is because it is incubated from Elvis Presley and made by Zeng Dejun.
The public's universal impression of a 60-year-old man is probably three generations of the same church, raising a long life, getting up early to play tai chi, and playing chess in the park in the afternoon. But the Zeng Dejun in front of me is not like this, even if he landed on a business trip from other places at three o'clock last night, he is still mental, and when he picks up his own product introduction, his speed of speech and thinking is quite fast.
What surprised me even more was what he was wearing: a T-shirt with a small new pattern of crayons, and a top and northface joint vest. Zeng Dejun said that this vest was bought by him on the basis of goods.
Wearing a tide brand and a trend app, Zeng Dejun is definitely a hipster.
So after chatting with Zeng Dejun for half an hour, I was already convinced that xog, a very young fashion brand that looks like the future, is indeed naturally from Zeng Dejun's hand.
Aside from his biological age and appearance, he actually has nothing to do with the word "old". But returning to youthfulness is not the encounter of all post-50s, it is not a question of how much brain platinum to drink, but about the thinking pattern in the brain.
At least for a while, Zeng Dejun did not jump out of the limitations of his age and age.
▲ Stills from "Pirate Radio"
Zeng Dejun said:
Older people like me have seen all sorts of cultures that were insensitive, some preferred, and some repulsive in my formative years. But in reality, these cultures, especially the insensitive and resentful, depend on their own perceptions. For example, hippie culture and hip-hop culture, I was initially disgusted. These cultures spread to China in the 1980s, and what flared pants and airplane heads were said to be negative and decadent at that time, and I was educated in this way. Later, when we were going to make a hippie culture product, my whole being was going to collapse, and I was initially against it. So at that time, Li Wen (note: the former editor-in-chief of City Illustrated & Elvis Presley) gave me two books, "On the Road" and "Dharma Wanderer", and the movie "Pirate Radio", and after watching it, I found that my original cognition was completely wrong, and I even found that I was an old hippie, and it turned out that this was my nature. This belonged to the poverty that he recognized at the time, limiting his imagination.
When he realized this, Zeng Dejun said that he was open and began to embrace the outside world and embrace multiculturalism.
In the first two years, some investors even said that they only invested in the post-90s, because many people's stereotypes are that old age is an obstacle to entrepreneurial innovation, because it is difficult for the elderly to update their thinking. But on the other hand, after Zeng Dejun was able to break through cognition and reconstruct cognition, the accumulation and experience of the past was a huge wealth.
Zeng Dejun told Ai Fan'er that there was once a senior person in the consumer electronics industry who had contacted him several times, and had been hesitant to invest in Elvis Presley, but finally did not invest. The main reason is that zeng Dejun is making a toc product, and he does not believe that he can do a good job of toc products at such an old age.
From disgusting with hippie culture to discovering that hippies are actually myself, Zeng Dejun has completed a breakthrough in his own cognitive limitations, which gives him the basis of thinking for two completely different temperament brands at the same time, Elvis Presley and xog.
But in the case that the Elvis presley brand is already very successful, there must be a reason for making a new brand.
xog is actually to expand the boundaries of the Elvis presley brand. We say that the Elvis presley brand is biased towards the aesthetics of life, which is a small cute and small lucky type. But we look at the whole society, the culture is very diverse, our original products are more female consumers, but in fact, the audio market, female buyers are a minority, from the proportion point of view, we still belong to a relatively small minority. So we are in addition to the aesthetics of life, to do the aesthetics of science and technology, mechanical aesthetics, xog this brand has its own tonality, not Elvis Presley's kind of small luck. We have formed an inertial impression of the Elvis presley brand, but we don't want to educate consumers, so we made sub-brands under Elvis Presley and repositioned them to represent what this group of people want.
Now the xog brand has two main products for sale: mini portable speaker mechanical optical omater cube and desktop speaker mechanical optical omater shell, priced at 599 yuan and 1299 yuan respectively, for domestic brand speakers, this price is not cheap, many mobile phone brands produced smart speakers look more cost-effective.
▲ xog mechanical optical domain shell
But when Zeng Dejun handed me these two products, I knew that xog did not intend to live cost-effectively. He compares his own vest:
Before I thought that I could buy 99 functional vests on Taobao, now I buy a functional vest, and I spend 5999 yuan on the thing to buy. But what's the difference in functional functions? In addition to these co-branded logos, the color changed from army green to black, and there was no change in function. What changes is the emotion. The two vests feel different when worn. So why does that thing exist? Not because I'm alone, but because there's a bunch of people like me to support me. When the economy develops to a certain extent, the concept of consumption will also change, and the cognitive preferences of society will also change.
At the same time, Zeng Dejun also stressed that xog's products will not be products that do brand premiums. At least, in terms of materials and workmanship, the cost of xog's two products is not low. For example, the mechanical optical cube is very small, in such a small space into the speaker, fingertip gyroscope and torch function, and then the whole body control knobs and buttons, while maintaining a good sound quality, this challenge to technology and production is not small, to do innovation in the motor, power amplifier and power supply.
▲ The mechanical structure of the xog mechanical optical cube is quite complex
Our general product is enough for a production line of 20 people, the mechanical optical cube is about 40 people a production line, and the mechanical optical domain shell is about a hundred people. The assembly difficulty of this mechanical design is too high, many of them are non-standard components, a large number of screws inside, are hexagonal, inside and outside a variety of different colors, a variety of sizes of things, the whole to the production line of people crazy.
In Zeng Dejun's view, the original intention of doing xog may be to expand the boundaries of Elvis Presley, but its vision is not only to make a more futuristic, harder-core, and more complex differentiated product than Elvis presley products, but also to make a "Created in China" brand that is leading in culture, design and technology.
▲ Zeng Dejun made China's first commercial hifi bile machine in 1992, which is the common name for the tube audio amplifier
Zeng Dejun has a recognized title called "the father of China's gut machine", is the earliest batch of pioneers and entrepreneurs in China's audio industry, and after 40 or 50 years of dealing with radio and audio, he can finally say this sentence in this era:
Now when we talk about Chinese creation, there is this kind of strength, I see the audio industry has changed over the decades, and it turns out that I really admire Sony, Apple's various products. Now we will not regard them as competitors, because we are different existences, that is, the post-90s like to say, different fireworks.
To some extent, Elvis Presley's explosive product, the little prince, is actually a renaissance. Coupled with Zeng Dejun's age, I once thought that he was a nostalgic person.
In fact, nostalgia and innovation are not contradictory, as mentioned earlier, Zeng Dejun likes multiculturalism, pursues trends, and his strong radio complex can coexist well, and the elderly can also do trendy play.
▲ Elvis Presley's "Wild" speakers are now under the xog brand
The xog mechanical optical cube is derived from the previous Elvis Presley series of speakers, and the new design has three main places: the addition of ring breathing lights; the addition of transparent barrel packaging; and the addition of fingertip gyro modules. These two changes alone make a retro military-style product futuristic.
When I expressed my curiosity about the design and asked where the inspiration came from, Zeng Dejun did not answer me directly, but took me to his office.
The most important things in Zeng Dejun's office are various digital products: radios of various ages, Apple's first iPod, Sony's first walkman, Sony's first minidisc player, the first mp3, the first generation of iPhone, etc. There are hundreds of electronic products of various ages to do a solo exhibition.
Zeng Dejun, who is in his 60s, can mention a "senior digital player" in addition to the label of audio engineer, entrepreneur, and trend enthusiast, in fact, he can also be a "jewelry researcher", "product manager" or "radio engineer", or even a "missile control system instructor" (Zeng Dejun has more than 20 years of military and military school careers).
Enough life experience has given him enough product insight.
Zeng Dejun said that adding lights and fidget spinners to the original "Wild" series was his proposal:
At that time, when the interior was doing the mechanical optical cube, it was necessary to add a knob, and the feeling of clicking and clicking was very decompressed. I think the knob is decompressed because it has a feel and an auditory sense, but it still lacks visual feelings. So I said to add lighting, but also to add a fidget gyroscope, and then to integrate into the vision, so that the sensory experience is very complex, and people's emotions will change accordingly.
The lights that will turn on and the spinning tops are derived from Zeng Dejun's two life experiences. When he was a child, there was no electric lamp at home, in addition to the kerosene lamp, the only artificial light source was the flashlight, but at that time the flashlight was not something that ordinary people could afford, so the flashlight had both a sense of mystery and worship for him. In fact, many creatures will have phototropism, and even if humans do not have such a strong phototropism, they still like light.
At the same time, he also found that his newborn grandson, although he could not speak yet, would be attracted when he saw the small windmill turning; even when feeding him liquid food, the windmill would turn and he would eat, and if the windmill did not turn, he would not like to eat.
In short, although it is the first batch of products under the xog brand, the mechanical optical cube has been able to represent a product concept of Zeng Dejun: do not do "there are not many of you, no you are not much" products, do not do no soul, no feeling, pure instrumental things. xog hopes to provide additional emotional value in addition to the basic functions, so that users can "play" and enjoy.
Zeng Dejun, who has started a business five times, does not want to do things that are repeated with others.
Zeng Dejun, who loves trends, open-mindedness and pluralism of thoughts more than most young people, actually still has an anxiety in his heart that cannot be shaken off, and this anxiety comes from age. He said to me:
I think it's a good and happy thing to work with the young people in our company, they can make me younger, they can make me more aware of this society. Sometimes when I hear "Borrow another Five Hundred Years from Heaven", I can understand this mentality. I always have a countdown ticking in my heart, and you probably won't have this countdown feeling. In my countdown time, I don't want to waste a minute and a second doing worthless things.