February 8, 2021 – In a recent test of smart jewelry available on the market, conducted by Business Insider, the Croatian Bellabeat Leaf Urban pendant was named the best smart jewelry, and Bellabeat's Leaf Chakra the best smart bracelet in the world.

As Jutarnji list reports, smart jewelry from one of the first and most successful Croatian startups, the company Bellabeat, was rated the best in the world in the Business Insider survey. They rated Bellabeat’s Leaf Urban pendant as the best smart jewelry in the world, as well as Bellabeat's Leaf Chakra as the best smart bracelet in the world.

The startup of Croatian mathematician Sandro Mur and Slovenian artist Urška Sršen, which became a subsidiary of Five River Group, has been breaking into the market again for the last three years and is succeeding.

Fitness tracker as a work of art

In recent years, Bellabeat has been written about mostly in the context of downsizing and business problems. However, three years ago, they got a new investment, as much as 14 million dollars, started attracting new staff, and now they have received the first major confirmation of their progress in product development.

So far, they have sold two million of their products, and their main market is the US.

Bellabeat states that Leaf Urban, also their best-selling product, is a perfect blend of technology and modern design. They have shown that smart jewelry does not have to be ugly or super masculine to be highly technically useful.

"This piece of smart jewelry in the shape of a leaf turns a fitness tracker into a work of art. It can be worn as a bracelet, necklace or brooch, does not disturb the user with an additional screen, its battery lasts up to 6 months and can monitor your activity, stress level, hydration, menstrual cycle, meditation, and sleep. It connects wirelessly to a mobile app," they point out.

Eight million people use their app

All ideas for Bellabeat's products came from their creative director Urška Sršen. In a recent interview for Jutarnji list, she said that she has been battling autoimmune diseases since she was a child and that she has learned to control them by managing her lifestyle with enough exercise, proper nutrition, enough sleep, and stress reduction.

“I realized that technology can be a great tool that can help raise awareness of your own lifestyle and hone healthy habits. That's how Bellabeat came to be. Most of the tools that were on the market until then were not so much adapted to women, i.e., users who are not so much focused exclusively on fitness, but on their lifestyle in general," said Sršen, who once ended up on Forbes' prestigious "30 under 30" list.

Bellabeat Leaf Urban

The smart water bottle Spring, which enables automatic hydration monitoring, is also in their offer, as well as the Time smartwatch and the new Ivy collection, similar to Leaf, which has additional functions for measuring heart rate and cardio coherence.

In addition to hardware, Bellabeat is increasingly working on its software, which is used by about eight million people. Their app offers more and more personalized content, such as tips related to women’s health and beauty, diet recipes, training plan, guided meditations etc.

Testing and collecting data

This Croatian startup has developed an algorithm that can predict stress resistance on any given day. They claim that if you say that you did not sleep well or that you did not exercise, the algorithm itself will predict that you may be more susceptible to stress that day.

Bellabeat's young team develops this content in collaboration with top wellness instructors. Also, when developing all their products and contents, they consult with medical experts and they test and verify everything.

"I think that in the future, technology will be an increasing factor and contributor to the wellness industry's progress. We want to be a ‘data company’. Technology is our tool, but data is our greatest treasure. Based on that, we can further improve our services, but also work on the development of the wellness market in general," concludes Sršen.

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Early next year, the successful Croatian startup, Bellabeat, plans to launch a new product.

As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 15th of October, 2019, as of early next year, Bellabeat, the first Croatian startup reach a record a 4.5 million US dollar investment from Silicon Valley investors and the first to hit a record 6.5 million US dollar sales contract, will launch a new generation of its product with which it has embarked on global expansion.

What the product itself is, is smart jewellery which, through a mobile app and modern technology, would create the world's largest women's wellness club. Urška Sršen, the co-founder of Bellabeat, says that the company is developing and expanding into new categories in the highly competitive wellness market.

"By the beginning of 2020, our new smart jewellery, new generations and new designs will appear on the market to measure additional performance," says Sršen.

Bellabeat was launched back in 2014 and has about seventy employees today, and as many as 65 percent of them are women. The company, which operates from Zagreb while legally based in the US, was founded by Croatian mathematician Sandro Mur, today CEO of the company, and Slovenian artist Urška Sršen, who is now the creative director of the company.

Their first product was a smart Leaf pendant, in the shape of a bracelet and chain.

Bellabeat, meanwhile, has developed several new versions of Leaf, and is currently developing the latest version with Swarovski crystals. In addition, Bellabeat has expanded its offering to include its own Hybrid wellness watch, a smart water bottle called Hydration tracker and an Aroma diffuser with its own line of essential oils.

At the end of 2017, the company was in crisis. It then let go a part of its employees and then withdrew from the public. Last year, Bellabeat received the second largest startup investment in Croatia, 14.2 million dollars from AOL Ventures, and increased the number of employees to seventy. Hamag-Bicro also states that it gave them 1.49 million kuna.

When asked, Sršen says that they are satisfied and proud of the results in their business.

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