Sonny Vu holds up what looks like a brushed aluminum button. It's about the size of a quarter and when he taps it, light shines through little dots that line its circumference. It is his startup's debut creation: the Misfit Shine, a sleek re-imagination of the pedometer and, he says, it's the future of fitness tracking.

Vu and his team at Misfit Wearables aren't alone in wanting to remake the explosive fitness tracker market, which includes the Jawbone Up, Nike FuelBand, Fitbit One and other gadgets meant to help you shape up and slim down. The field is growing increasingly crowded, with the Fitbit Flex, Amiigo, and Withings Smart Activity Tracker due to launch in the coming months. We'll see some 90 million wearable fitness and activity trackers ship by 2017, according to ABI Research.

The Misfit Shine in a sports band. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Though similar in function, the Shine sits in an entirely different world of design. Instead of the plastic and rubber so common to fitness trackers, Shine is made of aluminum. It's lightweight, small and incredibly simple, with no charging or syncing ports. An accelerometer inside tracks your movements, from walking and running to bicycling and swimming. You can wear it on your wrist or tuck it in your pocket, eliminating the bulkiness (and dorkiness) of other fitness trackers.

"Plastic and rubber are not things you would naturally wear," Vu says, speaking of the other fitness trackers available today. "You wouldn't go out and buy a rubber pendant. So we tried out ceramics and it was really hard. We tried out glass – everything we could that wasn't plastic or rubber – and we finally found this high-density aluminum."

The result is an incredibly pretty device, one that looks like something Johnny Ive or Yves Behar might design.

The nod to Apple is no surprise. Vu co-founded Misfit Wearables in August 2011 with his Agamatrix co-founder Sridhar Iyengar. At Agamatrix, the two had released the first FDA-approved glucose meter for the iPhone. It became the first and only medical device available in Apple retail stores. Their third co-founder: former Apple CEO John Sculley. Misfit is even named after a quote from the 1997 "Think Different" Apple commercials: "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes."

"We founded the company on the day Steve Jobs died," Vu says, "so we decided to name the company in honor of him."

Misfit's resident doctor Matthew, hardware products lead Steven, and firmware engineer Matt working out of the company's Daly City house. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

These guys have a ton of relevant experience. And they have the funding to back it up. Misfit Wearables raised $7.6 million in a Series A funding round in April, and ran the fastest-growing Indiegogo campaign, bringing in $846,675.

But as much as the Shine is pretty and well-funded, the team at Misfit Wearables is grounded. Its Bay Area office is a two-story house on a quiet, residential street in Daly City, a nondescript city south of San Francisco. The bedrooms serve as work rooms, one for the designers and the other for the engineers, and a meeting room. The kitchen and room serve as lunchroom and operations work space. Every room features big Costco picnic tables that are, ahem, plastic.

The house is perhaps best described as cozy, with boxes and papers strewn across tables and the hardwood floors. There's a beautiful outdoor porch with a hammock and a sizable backyard where everyone eats lunch on sunny days. Employees pad around the house in their socks, their shoes left at the front door. The walls are sparse, with the exception of whiteboards covered with sketches and writing. A giant set of shelves holds big bags of trail mix, boxes of cereal and an impressive assortment of drinks – all of which probably came from Costco as well. It's the antithesis of the stereotypical Silicon Valley flash and flair.

"We had one of the venture investors come over and he said, 'You have the highest amount raised to rent ratio for a startup,'" Vu says. "We just don't believe in spending money on expensive real estate – it's stupid. This is my third company now. What a lot of first time-entrepreneurs do when they have money is they spend it. And I'm like no."

Vu isn't just being frugal, he's being smart. A hardware company has a many more costs than your average software business. The money it takes to manufacture the Shine is much higher than just paying developers and designers to build an app (which Misfit is also doing). For example, it takes four factories to build the Shine's shell alone. One for the CNC milling, one for powder coating and sandblasting, one for anodizing the metal, and finally one for shooting thousands of microholes in the device for light to shine through.

Part of the Misfit Wearables posse eating lunch. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

The refusal to waste money compliments Vu's aversion to unnecessary risk, something he's picked up from running two companies.

"There's this stereotype that entrepreneurs take risks," he says. "I do not fit that stereotype. What I say is, our resources are scarce but they are secure... We are taking fewer risks and being prepared for the worst."

But as some studies show, such concerns can be highly motivating and spur success. And Misfit Wearables has done well for itself so far, with a heavy-hitting funding round and Indiegogo campaign on its belt. Instead of fancy real estate or furniture, the company funnels its money toward product and people. Another unique quality about Misfit: the majority of its employees work in Vietnam, Vu's home country.

The Daly City home office has 12 employees, whereas around 30 people work in Vietnam as developers, designers and operations members. Vu says there's a lot of untapped talent beyond the Silicon Valley bubble, and it can be hired for a fraction of the cost. Seven of those people in the Vietnam office are Ph.D.s, all of whom got their degrees overseas and then decided to return to Vietnam. Not only does Misfit Wearables avoid competing with the Googles and Facebooks of the Bay Area for talent, it can pay developers in Vietnam about one-half or one-third what it would pay local talent – and yet those developers still earn three times the going rate in that country. Everyone wins.

Vu says Misfit Shine is less concerned about what's typical of tech startups and more concerned with developing the right culture. Though he's not a risk taker, he's also not a rule follower – hence the company name. Vu says that Misfit has three core cultural requirements: be thoughtful, be a misfit, be a servant leader. At his last company he said the culture shifted "from a company of being right, to one of being loud," and he and his cofounders decided to combat that common occurrence.

Misfit Shine is also unique in its lack of heirarchy. On the team's page, the cofounders are all listed as "helpers." It's more than just idealism and show. "The team lead is supposed to take out the trash, not the intern," Vu says. "We wanted that in our DNA, it makes people check their ego at the door."

Misfit designer Sumeet. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

Amidst a tech industry with an extravagant party reputation, where CEOs flashily drive around with fancy gear, Misfit Shine is an outlier. That is in part because running a hardware startup is different running a hot, software darling. There are inherently more risks, so it's harder to get caught up in the rush of money and success.

All of Misfit's decisions are toward a singular, and somewhat ironic, goal: Make wearables mainstream. Vu says that he wants the Shine to appeal to New Yorkers, not just your average tech geek in Silicon Valley. He wants to appeal to the people in Oklahoma City, his stateside hometown. He says that they want to talk less about the technology involved, and more about the wearability of the Shine. How the magnetic clasp easily snaps onto your collar or pants or shoes. Or how the accessories – a sports wristband, a leather wristband, and a necklace – make Shine look even better on you.

But the tech itself is impressive, too. The Shine syncs its data with a smartphone app, just by placing it atop your phone's screen. Vu wouldn't go into detail on how this works, but he says it is a combination of already available syncing technologies. Shine also has excellent power management. It runs on a single cell battery, much like a watch, and you only need to replace it about twice a year.

The Shine is only the beginning for Misfit Wearables. Vu says that that company plans on making many more wearable devices, more in a medical direction than pure consumer fitness tracking. For now, you can pre-order the Shine for $100; the company will start shipping in July.

"We wanted to create an experience relevant to us," Vu says. "I think everybody feels like they don't fit in somewhere – hopefully with Shine you can fit in and be yourself. Everyone's a misfit in a way."