“I can not see any vital progress over the subsequent few years,” says Stryjak. “Different corporations have caught up just a little bit when it comes to making issues extra sturdy and sustainable and repairable, and with shoppers a key driver continues to be pricing and model. Fairphone could have its loyal fan base, however I can not see that considerably increasing anytime quickly.”
“No one Needs to Pull on a Useless Horse”
We put to Fairphone the thought it could need to make do pootling together with this identical area of interest viewers. “I’ll say it’s nonsense, proper?” Fairphone CEO Raymond van Eck informed WIRED.
“I’d by no means have began at an organization … if we really feel there isn’t a potential. No one needs to, as we are saying in Dutch, pull on a lifeless horse to see if it will stroll.” Fairphone is predicated in Amsterdam, and van Eck was appointed CEO in August 2024.
“Within the subsequent 5 years, we actually have the intention to quadruple our addressable market and to take our justifiable share of that,” says van Eck. The corporate has additionally set a purpose of “double digit progress” only for this yr. The apparent query: how?
A part of Fairphone’s technique is after all seen within the Fairphone 6 itself. It has some neat concepts resembling a slider that places the cellphone into an Necessities mode. This pares again the interface that will help you get away from the distractions of, for instance, social media.
There’s a breezy life-style angle right here Fairphones have arguably not had earlier than. And fostering that was part of the rebrand the corporate kicked off initially of 2025, which included binning the stiff-looking, all-caps firm brand of outdated for one thing a bit extra pleasant.
The Fairphone Repair
Van Eck says it’s about “altering the order” of priorities, of placing the machine itself at pole place fairly than the ethics it represents. “In the long run, it is also clarifying Fairphone’s imaginative and prescient, as a result of the rebrand gave us a extra pleasant, extra approachable id,” he says. “It’s a bit much less paternalistic.”
The message is that Fairphone isn’t only a cellphone for eco warriors. And chief expertise officer Chandler Elizabeth Hatton means that picture, that basic Fairphone message, could have truly proved off-putting for some.
“Once we are advertising the machine, we do not lead with that. Not in our promoting campaigns, not in our communication, and in addition not the way in which that I want to convey it to you,” says Hatton. “It could turn out to be preachy in some markets. That message is resonating much less proper now. There are folks which might be in panic but in addition utterly exhausted by the local weather disaster or questions of ethics.”
So … is it time to de-woke Fairphone? That appears too blunt an interpretation, as a result of there’s no indication that Fairphone plans to dilute its requirements. It’s simply not going to harp on about them fairly as overtly.
Turning Down the Quantity
“Fairphone was based 12 years in the past, principally to sort out the social and environmental points embedded within the electronics trade,” says Van Eck. “What we additionally noticed is that Fairphone was fairly located round telling that story … which meant that the Fairphone was for a lesser addressable market.”
This new method additionally entails not having too daring a tackle issues like AI, which owing to its environmental influence might be seen as antithetical to 1 a part of the outdated Fairphone message.
