Why Customers Buy Nothing

I sat down with Pei in the company’s London HQ. Pei is a calm but concentrated presence, the sort of person who may be sitting silently but still commands the room. Immaculately but quietly dressed, he had a casual air that belied his intense focus.

I asked him about potential price rises and whether he thought the company would be affected. “I think we're relatively well positioned to weather whatever's coming, because the companies that use price as their main selling point, those will be impacted the most. When we do our user research, the reason why people buy our phones is because they like the design, they like the software, or they like the brand, usually in that order,” Pei explained.

“Price is number four, so I think we're less impacted by this,” he went on. “However, you know, it is true, the cost of building these products are increasing and, we have to find a balance of selecting the phone a little bit differently and playing around with price to make it work.

Design has long been a hallmark of the company, releasing products which have unique looks and an emphasis on being different.

“I grew up during the days of the iMac and iPod and the first-generation iPhone,” Pei said. “They looked really cool, but they were also quite inspirational to me.”

Designing A System, Not Just Products

Before Nothing launched its first device, Pei and his team created a design book. “We made a book because we wanted to guide our future direction,” he explained. “A lot of consumer tech companies have kind of lost it when it comes to design.”

Pei suggested that too many companies build products in isolation, rather than as part of a wider ecosystem. The result is fragmentation. By contrast, he pointed to companies like Sony in its prime and Apple today as examples of brands that understood design as a system.

“They created quite a consistent universe,” he said. “Even if you didn’t see the logo, you could tell it was a Sony.”

That’s the ambition for Nothing: “If you put all our products on the table and put tape over our logo, you can still tell that it’s a Nothing product.”

The Power Of Simplicity — And The Right Team

Executing that vision comes down to people, Pei told me. “Everything is easy when you work with great people,” he said. “It’s like in sports — the top athletes look like they’re having fun, but they’re performing really well.”

Nothing’s early work helped define its distinctive aesthetic, including its signature transparency.

Nothing has steadily evolved its design language, introducing more premium materials like metal while maintaining its recognizable identity.

“We began adding more metal into our design language,” Pei said, pointing to newer products like the Phone (4a) Pro which has a metal back and small transparent element.

Rethinking What A Flagship Means

Nothing hasn’t released a flagship phone this year and Pei explained that an annual refresh isn’t his priority. “I wouldn’t want to force having another flagship unless we had something we really wanted to bring out into the world,” Pei said. “In the smartphone space, flagships have just become products where you ask suppliers for the latest parts and put everything together,” he added.

For Nothing, that seems to mean prioritizing ideas over components.

“With Phone (3), we launched the Glyph Matrix because we felt it could be a more expressive way to let people know what’s important to them,” he explains. “For us, that was more of a flagship.”

The Pragmatic Approach To AI

While competitors race to position artificial intelligence as the centerpiece of their devices, Pei was more pragmatic.

“When we look at AI applied to consumer scenarios, there’s very little that’s been successful,” he said. “ChatGPT is the most successful consumer AI product. Not much else.”

“We only want to add things that are useful,” he said, citing features like Essential Space, which captures ideas, recordings, and content in one place, and AI-powered voice typing that restructures spoken input into polished text.

“We built a search feature into Nothing OS. So when you swipe up, if you have something you want to figure out, you can just type it in and get the answer directly without going into a search engine or a browser,” he said. What I'm really excited about currently is, typing with your voice because humans we speak way faster than we read or type. We speak about 140 words per minute, but type about 40,” Pei explained. It means that you can press and hold a button like a walkie-talkie and we will reorganize your verbal input into something that looks like what you would have written.”

And the future, Pei believes, offers something even more exciting: personalized software.

“In the future, operating systems will be made one-for-one,” he said. “With AI, code is becoming free, which means that everybody will get their hyper-personalized version of an OS or any type of software.”

A Constant Balance

Positioned between startups and tech giants, Nothing occupies a deliberate middle ground.

“We’re not very big. We’re not very small,” Pei said. “If you’re too small, you can’t execute. If you’re too big, it’s harder to move fast. It's a constant balance between, growing, scaling, and profitability. You've got to keep weighing these. But ideally, I think, you know, there's a virtuous cycle and a vicious cycle of building a company. The virtuous cycle is that you have enough margin on your products. Not because you want to make a lot of money, but so you can reinvest those margins into novel technologies that are useful to people.”