The Financial Times Called Habity "Pleasingly Retro".  Here's the Story Behind That

We have a little news, and it made the whole team unreasonably happy: the Financial Times spent a month living with gadgets designed to pull people off their phones, and our alarm clock made the cut. They called it "pleasingly retro" — which, for a company that makes alarm clocks, felt exactly on time. (Sorry. Had to.)

For anyone who missed it, FT Magazine's Tom Faber tested a handful of single-purpose devices — cameras, turntables, notepads — each one built to do just one thing your phone does, without dragging you into everything else it does too. Our clock was there to solve exactly one problem: getting your phone out of the bedroom without losing the ability to wake up on time.

That "pleasingly retro" line isn't an accident. It's basically the brief we wrote for ourselves back when Habity was still a sketch and a lot of hope. Retro on the outside, modern on the inside was the whole idea from day one. We wanted something that felt like it belonged to a slower decade — soft curves, a warm glow, buttons you can find without your glasses on — while quietly running e-paper, gentle alarms, and all the small conveniences that a plastic alarm clock from decades past never could.

The review put it plainly: our controls can feel a little fiddly at first, though everything runs smoothly once it's set up. That's fair, and it's feedback we'd rather sit with than wave away. There's genuinely a lot you can customize on the clock — alarm tones, brightness, wake-up light, plus a few simple toggles, like that cartoon face on the screen, which you're welcome to turn off if it's not your vibe.

All of that depth is there for people who want to dig in, but it does mean there's more to learn upfront than a clock should probably ask of you. We suspect the review unit landed just before we shipped an update that simplified the navigation and setup flow, so some of that friction should already feel lighter for anyone picking one up today. Either way, we're genuinely glad the experience held up and felt good, fiddly bits included.

Thanks to Tom Faber and the FT team for including us. It's a strange, wonderful thing to build something in a small studio and then see it turn up next to a Leica and a Teenage Engineering recorder in a national newspaper. We'll take it.

- The habity team.