French Watch company

Wearable health trackers, including the Nike FuelBand, the FitBit Flex, and Apple's upcoming iWatch, are de rigueur right now. But they've all got the same problem: More than a third of all people who buy one stop using it in six months. It's an abysmal drop-out rate that makes wearables seem less like the next big thing in consumer electronics than the 21st-century equivalent of a Pet Rock or a Chia Pet: dumb products that no one ever bought for themselves twice.

But Withings, a French consumer electronics company specializing in smart, connected health devices such as the WiFi Body Scale, thinks wearables are destined to be popular. As Withings sees it, we've already been sporting wearable technology—watches—on our wrists for hundreds of years, and try as it might, the smartphone has not been successful in killing off the wristwatch industry. Maybe the ideal smartwatch, then, is a lot more like the dumbwatch of yesteryear than tech companies want us to think.

Enter the Activité. Announced Monday, the Withings Activité resembles an analog watch. But while it may look old-school, the Activité packs some secret tech inside its churning horologic guts: a motion detector that can track your steps, exercise, calories burned, and other fitness metrics, and beam them to your smartphone over Bluetooth for analysis.

"The problem with most wearables right now is that they're not really wearables, " Withings' CMO Julien De Préaumont tells Co.Design. He says that while the wearable market is crowded, customers tend to just stop wearing their fitness trackers for a host of reasons: because they have to be charged every day, or aren't waterproof, or don't blend in with your wardrobe. "The challenge is to create this emotional link that makes people love these wearable devices enough to fit them into their daily lives."

For the Activité, Withings decided to go in a different direction from most fitness trackers. It's basically a FitBit that's nestled, Matryoshka-like, inside a functioning Swiss watch. Designed in collaboration with French watch designers, the Activité has a band made of high-quality French leather from Tanneries Haas, one of France's oldest and most successful tanneries, as well as a crystal made of unscratchable Sapphire glass housed in a stainless steel watch case. Available in silver or black, it's a classy design that barely betrays to an outside observer the fact that it doesn't just track time, but motion as well. In fact, looking at it, the only hint that the Activité is also a fitness tracker is a smaller second hand, which indicates how much of your daily exercise goal you've reached.