Fairphone gets its audio groove on with repairable over-ear BT headphones

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone is best known for its mission to build ethical smartphones via a brand that promises fairer wages for supply chain workers and design choices that encourage consumers to cherish and repair the hardware rather than toss last year’s model thanks to modularity and a web shop selling replacement (and upgradeable) spare parts.

Today it’s taking the leap into a new device category — applying the same principled approach to shipping the most sustainable and fair consumer electronics it can, within limits imposed by wider industry practices which set the availability (and compatibility) of electronics components, to a pair of its own-design, over-ear Bluetooth headphones. The latest repairable Fairphone product is called Fairbuds XL.

Confusingly, Fairbuds XL are very much not (in-ear) earbuds. So the choice of name is evidently a bit of a pun. Fairphone tells TechCrunch there was hot debate internally over what to call the headphones. We can only imagine what other options were toyed with and rejected. But, clearly, naming a pair of over-ear headphones “buds” will cause some to howl in disbelief. Still, at least they sidestepped the obvious (yet alluring) pitfall of calling the cans Fairphones (see what we did there!). The final name choice was favored for being “unique”, as they tell it.