The survivor in a harsh market
The smart-ring market sorts into rough tiers. Oura sits alone at the top, selling in the millions a year and having effectively created the category. A middle tier — Ultrahuman, RingConn, Samsung — moves on the order of half a million units. Then there is a third tier, a few hundred thousand a year at most, where Circular sits alongside names like JC-Ring and Luna.
What makes Circular interesting isn’t its rank. It’s that, of the companies still standing, Circular is the only one with no real hardware-manufacturing capability of its own — and it survived anyway. A French team with a troubled supply history and a genuine IP problem didn’t just stay in a brutal category but also kept growing. How it did that is a great playbook worth reading.
Own only what gives you leverage
Circular’s first good decision was to stop pretending to be a manufacturer. Early rings were self-developed and built on its own line; by the Circular Ring 2, the company had moved production to an Asian ODM and kept for itself only the parts where it could actually win — its firmware, algorithms, app, and marketing. It even turned the arrangement into a white-label business, supplying the same hardware to other emerging brands while keeping its software proprietary.
The boundary is the lesson. Hardware goes to the ODM. The app stays in-house. Firmware and algorithms are the gray zone you tune by stage and by what the ODM can offer. Self-building hardware can be necessary early, when the supply chain is immature and nobody else can make what you need. But once the factories catch up — and in smart rings they did, fast — continuing to manage materials, tooling, and production lines is a misallocation. The energy belongs where you have leverage: demand, distribution, software. Not where you don’t.
Fix what users actually feel
The second decision was about the ring itself. Circular’s earlier designs used a platform with protruding contacts, in the style of the old Motiv ring. The Ring 2 switched to a plain round shell, like Oura’s, making it significantly more comfortable to wear. That type of change probably did more for the product than adding new features could, because the things that decide whether someone keeps wearing a ring are unglamorous: comfort, simplicity, stability, accuracy. Following the category leader on the basics that users feel beats differentiating on the basics they don’t.
Turn an IP problem into a partnership
Circular’s most counterintuitive move was on intellectual property. Rather than fight or dodge, it became the first smart-ring brand to sign a licensing agreement with Oura, gaining the right to distribute worldwide while leaning on Oura’s portfolio of a hundred-plus patents. An infringement liability became a distribution advantage and, indirectly, the white-label business on top of it.
The general principle: in a category with a patent-heavy incumbent, solving compliance early is cheaper than it looks and turns into a moat. The companies that keep stepping on the same legal landmines pay for it again and again; the one that paid once, up front, bought itself room to operate.
Don’t differentiate away from demand
Circular’s real strength was narrative. It was good at new product launches, at positioning, at talking to consumers — it raised several million dollars on Kickstarter for the Ring 2 and leaned on “no subscription” and AI insights as its wedge against Oura’s data-and-clinical authority. That points at the subtler strategic error most challengers make.
Faced with a dominant incumbent, teams assume the incumbent is the enemy and rush to differentiate on scenario and features — a different use case, a different audience. But the company that created the category is also the one spending hundreds of millions to teach the world that a ring is for sleep and recovery. Differentiating away from that forfeits the slipstream. The real competitors aren’t the leader; they’re the other challengers absorbing the leader’s overflow demand. Against them, the winning shape is to match the leader on the core users and the core scenario, and differentiate only on price and the small stuff — color, software, an algorithm here and there.
Put bluntly: investors want a different Oura, because difference is what makes a pitch sound new. Users just want a cheaper Oura that works. The challengers who internalize that — and resist the pull to manufacture artificial differentiation — are the ones with room to grow. Circular, for all its flaws, mostly got that part right.