Jawbone has had its share of struggle in the fitness band market, with the company in a series of lawsuits with Fitbit due to the rival company hiring former Jawbone employees and taking their trade secrets over to the rival company. And yet, for all these patent lawsuits, you'd assume things were on the up and up for Jawbone (after all, companies only pay lawyers and file lawsuits when they have the financial fortune to do so).
Well, all is not well within the company, it seems. According to an inside source on the matter, Jawbone has stopped making UP fitness bands (specifically its UP2, UP3, and UP4 fitness trackers) and has sold off the rest of the UP fitness bands to a third-party seller: "The company has struggled to sell the devices and was forced to offload them at a discount to a reseller in order to get the revenue it needed to keep the business going, according to the source," Tech Insider says.
The publication says that Jawbone has not departed from the wearables business; the sale is something of a way for the company to make money on the old fitness trackers sitting in inventory. What we can see from this situation, though, is that Jawbone's UP fitness trackers aren't selling that well, otherwise there'd be no need to sell them off in bulk to a third-party retailer.
While Jawbone is struggling to keep its business together, though, fitness tracker rival Fitbit has purchased Coin to implement mobile payments in its devices. Fitbit sees its fitness trackers and even its Blaze smartwatch as devices in which Fitbit can present mobile payments to its customers without concern about losing them to other platforms. Fitbit has had good success with the Blaze smartwatch, its first foray into the smartwatch market, as well as with its fashionable Alta fitness band. Android Wear manufacturer Fossil (known for the Q Founder) has purchased fitness tracker company Misfit, so it appears as though a number of fitness tracker makers who don't diversify their portfolio are "swallowed up" by larger players.
