On Friday, Sony announced that it was the creator of a strange crowdfunding campaign that had promised to deliver watches and accessories imbued with e-ink technology. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, a Sony spokesperson fessed up to creating a phantom company, called Fashion Entertainments, and launching its wearable experiment as a crowdfunding campaign to see if it could catch fire with nothing more than viral momentum.

The company's signature product, the FES Watch, has been designed to utilize e-ink technology on both the watch's face and its wristband. In the Fashion Entertainments launch video, the entirety of the watch's body is shown changing colors and designs based on how a user's wrist is aligned or held up, and the effect is pretty entrancing. However, the video's use of green-screen trickery is easy to see through, especially when later parts of the video show a user picking new colors and designs for wearable accessories such as headbands and shoe straps; neither the WSJ nor the Fashion Entertainments site have yet revealed a definitive real-world version of the watch.

While the demo showed a smartphone app being used to adjust e-ink designs, it didn't point to any connectivity with smartphone apps, so this appears to land squarely in the dumb-watch side of the spectrum. Ultimately, the initiative was described more as a way to imbue everyday items—from pen holders to bowties—with e-ink as a basic fabric, and its design team at Sony consists of only five engineers at this time.

Sony wouldn't confirm a release date for the FES Watch to the WSJ, but the Fashion Entertainments home page advertised delivery "after May of next year." According to the Sony spokesperson who spoke to the WSJ, “we hid Sony’s name because we wanted to test... whether there will be demand for our concept," but thus far, this is no Double Fine-level crowdfunding success. The report confirmed a grand total of 150 purchases thus far, totaling roughly 3.5 million yen (not quite $30,000 USD).