Misfit’s wearables have never looked much like other wearables. The company launched in April 2013 with Shine, a coin-sized, chrome-colored disc that looked more like space jewelry than the silicone bracelets being made at Nike or Jawbone. Misfit billed it as “the world's most elegant activity tracker," because, from the beginning, the premise of Misfit has been to make wearables that product lead Tim Golnik says “you’re not embarrassed to wear.”

That’s still the mantra, as evidenced by the products Misfit unveiled at CES this week. There are two: one is Ray, a wrist-worn fitness tracker ($100, available for pre-order here). The other is a set of connected in-ear headphones called Specter. Ray will hit the market soon; Specter is still something of a work-in-progress. It represents Misfit's first foray into engineering, and therefore needs a bit more engineering before its launch, which Misfit says is slated for later this year.

Functionally, Ray performs more or less identically to Shine, Misfit's signature wearable. It monitors activity and sleep, and can deliver notifications for texts, calls, and alarms—all pretty standard fare for this genus of gadget. (Through Misfit's Link app, it can also act as a remote control to functions like playing music and taking photos on your phone.) But Ray's selling point isn't technology. It's its genuine wearability. It looks like a bullet cartridge dipped in carbon black or rose gold, a form factor that evolved in response to the geometric redundancy that happened when Shine users also wore a watch. “Everything we’ve done up to this point has been a circular form factor,” Golnik says. "But if you wear a watch on the same wrist as your Shine, he says, "you’re putting two circles on one wrist." Wearing your watch and your Shine on opposite wrists doesn't quite work, either. "You get this Wonder Woman cuff look.”

Misfit

Misfit’s ambition with Ray—to make a fitness tracker that could coordinate visually with jewelry, watches, and even smartwatches—informed the technology inside. The company wanted Ray to capture the wearer's attention with vibration, but “vibrating motors are the enemy of power,” Golnik says. Seemingly endless battery life has been a hallmark feature of Misfit's product line from the start, but Ray's tubular shape made it hard to install a motor that wouldn’t kill the battery. The engineering team overcame this hurdle by incorporating a speaker that’s tuned for vibration, not audio. That tweak allowed Ray’s battery to last up to six months. As Golnik points out, every time you force a user to take off their tracker, you’re creating an opportunity for them to forget to put it back on. As with all of Misfit's products to date, Ray is meant to go on and stay on.

That's not the case with Specter, the company's second newly announced wearable. Golnik says the wireless headphones are being designed for a totally different experience, one where users don the earbuds for limited bursts of time—on flights, for instance, or long runs. Those earbuds come with an inconspicuous clip-on disc that contains a battery, Bluetooth circuitry, and an accelerometer, and communicates with your device to do things like queue up playlists and store activity data.

“We see headphones as a natural progression of wearables for us,” Golnik says. “You can put things in your shoe or pocket, so on your head or in your ears is the next natural thing.” Other companies seem to think so, too: LG, Sol Republic, and Jaybirds all have fitness-tracking headphones on the market. As with Ray, says Golnik, Specter's primary selling point is its minimal aesthetic. Horseshoe-shaped headphones can pack better battery life, but “those are kind of dorky looking, to be honest,” he says. “We want to cross the battery life of these horseshoe designs with the look of the earbuds... so you’re happy wearing them at the office.” That's the forthcoming value proposition of Specter: high-functioning technology that's thoughtfully packaged into something that doesn't scream "gearhead."

Mercifully, Misfit makes no attempt to mask the functionality of its products with bling—an issue we and others have had with wearables marketed toward women. Instead, the company's wearables seem to hint at a future where technology has reached the point that it's dissolved into the backdrop a bit. These devices aren't even designed to be pretty, really, so much as they're made to look sleek, minimalist, and cool. If anything, they're kind of androgynous-looking. Speaking for myself (and with unabashed bias), it's the first wearable I've ever considered buying.

The subjectivity of individual taste underscores a salient difference between smartphones and wearables. People like to compare the two, but the fact is: what you wear is a more subtle form of self-expression than what phone you use, which could explain why the growth and evolution of the wearables market looks so different from the course that smartphones have charted. According to Angela McIntyre, a Gartner analyst who watches the wearables space, the technologies inside most wearables are pretty similar, at least for now. "What's differentiating these companies are their market positions," she says. There are already several to choose from, but McIntyre says there will be many, many more. And the wearables market has ample room to grow. A Pew Internet study from this year found 64 percent of American adults owned a smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011. The wearables market, she says, is expected to expand more slowly (only 17% of American adults currently own a fitness tracker or wristband); but as that number increases, so will consumers' options. Fossil, which just acquired Misfit in November, is planning to roll out 100 smart gadgets in 2016, alone. In a review of the new Fitbit Blaze, another wearable unveiled at CES 2016, we offered this tip for following the wearables trend in 2016: "Just assume every company on the planet is making one."

In this way, Misfit's new form factors point to what we can expect from wearables going forward—not because all future devices will be this minimal, but because it represents yet another opportunity to hook consumers that simply haven't met a device they like.