Jack Mulroe thinks the premium headphone market is boring. Too focused on black, samey-looking devices; too caught up in the “spec wars” to figure out what the very best headset is. He just wants his California-inspired headphones to help people chill.
“I just saw a pattern of there being kind of a dead space, honestly, in the headphone market, where the most recent culturally relevant brand was Beats,” Mulroe says. “It just felt kind of stale.”
Mulroe is the CEO and founder of a new audio brand called Daisy, headquartered in California. It bills itself as “a team of industrial designers from outside the audio industry” aiming to shake up the already saturated headphone scene. The Daisy One headphones, revealed on Tuesday, are the company’s first product.
These retro-styled headphones are meant to go head-to-head with the big premium noise-canceling cans like Apple’s AirPods Max and Sony’s WH-1000XM6. Those are headphones that usually retail for $450 to $550. The Daisy One undercuts them slightly at $399. The goal is to sell sleek noise-canceling headphones for slightly less than the big dogs.
“I knew we’d be competing against the bigs: Sony, Bose, Beats, Apple,” Mulroe says. “I didn’t really mind that competition. It’s going to be all good.” But competition is fierce in this space across the price spectrum, like from London-based Nothing and its flashy over-ear headphones and Anker’s Soundcore budget options (one of which won WIRED’s blind test) to premium cans from Bowers & Wilkins or Grado.
Courtesy of Daisy
The Daisy One indeed look nice. They’re meant to be durable and long-lasting, made of aluminum with composite TR90 head straps, a material widely used by headphone manufacturers. (“You can just yeet it,” Mulroe says, stretching out the headband.) They are a little heavier than their competitors at 318 grams, or nearly three-quarters of a pound. The ear pads snap on and off via magnetic connection. They work with Bluetooth but also support USB-C and 3.5-mm auxiliary wired connections. The headphones come in three color options—silver, a blue shade called Pacific, and a greenish-brown called Kelp.
The design is meant to evoke some California chic, as most of the designers are based in the state. Some of the Daisy crew are former engineers with Harman Professional Solutions, an audio company owned by Samsung. The actual sound system inside is developed by Utah-based company ((nxc)) systems, which Daisy contracts with. Stored on the device itself are ambient soundscapes recorded in California, like ocean waves or the forest ambiance in Big Sur. There is also a guided breath-work exercise to help people chill out in stressful places like airports.
The Daisy One headphones get around 35 hours of battery life with noise canceling on and 45 hours with it off. Despite the marketing that these are reliable headphones designed to last, there is no way to replace the battery. Mulroe says it’s something the company is working on for future models. The headphones have also gotten mixed reviews, with some early testers on TikTok criticizing the transparency mode on the headphones—which lets sound in so you can hear your surroundings—saying they leave a lot to be desired. Mulroe is familiar with that complaint and says it can be upgraded later via a software patch.
“Transparency, it’s tough because we are up against Apple and Sony, who have great [intellectual property], great designers, great engineers, so they did it,” Mulroe says. “I tweaked out on transparency for months, like every single element of this product. It’s as good as I could make it in the time we had.”
These headphones are also launching at a very weird time for the electronics industry in general. Memory shortages are driving up costs for nearly everything, and asking customers to take a chance on an unproven, admittedly industry-outsider company is a risk. But Mulroe isn’t worried about that. Like the headphones themselves, he’s eager to project a very relaxed California chill.
“Pick ours up next to Sony and Bose and tell me who you like more, because I’m that confident in build quality,” Mulroe says. “I think we’re here to stay, honestly.”
