A launch four years in the making.
The reMarkable Paper Pro was a monumental undertaking — years of meticulous, deliberate work across every part of the company and its external partners. For the six months leading up to launch, I served as Acting Head of PR, leading a team of three responsible for the full media strategy and execution, review programme, leak management, influencer and affiliate marketing, a media tour spanning New York and San Francisco, and ultimately the reMarkable Paper Pro launch event. In addition to the in-house team, we managed and coordinated across two PR agencies, an influencer marketing agency and an affiliate marketing agency.
As much as this was the launch of a premium consumer technology product, it was also our first real opportunity to reach beyond the highly engaged tech enthusiasts who made up our early customer base — and tap into a much broader, mainstream audience. That meant leading with benefits over specs: a narrative around focus, clarity, and doing your best thinking, for people who didn't think of themselves as "tech people" but cared deeply about both.
The science behind the story.
To support this narrative, I commissioned a biometric lab study by neuroscientist Dr. Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy — whom I'd previously collaborated with during my time at Copenhagen Business School's Centre for Decision Neuroscience. Working alongside reMarkable's Head of R&D, Christian Bjerke, we set up a controlled study at the lab at Neurons Inc. testing how participants responded across various knowledge work tasks on a reMarkable versus a PC, measuring EEG brain activity, heart rate variability (HRV) and self-reported experience.
No research of this kind had previously been done on E Ink devices. The results were striking — and gave us powerful, credible claim support for the launch narrative. The study is currently under review in Nature's Scientific Reports.
A mini documentary on "better thinking".
Based on the study, we produced a mini-documentary that became a cornerstone of our earned media strategy — embedded in the press release, screened during media tours in New York and San Francisco, and distributed across our owned and paid channels. Dr. Ramsøy explains the study's findings; reMarkable Founder Magnus Wanberg and CEO Phil Hess discuss the mission to help people think better; and Chief Design Officer Mats Herding Solberg talks about the product innovation story.
A digital launch event — done the reMarkable way.
With audiences spread across the globe — customers, journalists, influencers, retailers and investors — a physical launch event wasn't the most scalable approach. I advocated for a digital launch event instead: premium, editorial, unmistakably on-brand.
I led all planning, participant recruitment and scripting, and worked closely with a small team on art direction, production and curation. The event was published across all channels on launch day, with the website and YouTube as the primary platforms.
To build anticipation, we ran a 24-hour teaser campaign the day before launch — an extreme close-up of the new product's bezels paired with the line "We've got big news" and a calendar entry people could add to their own calendars, marking the exact launch time. Distributed across our email list and social channels, it sparked immediate speculation and organic discussion in our communities on Facebook and Reddit, generating genuine excitement before a single product detail had been revealed.
Together, the pre-launch momentum, the premium digital launch event, strong reviews dropping simultaneously across the world's leading tech, business and consumer press, and the wider paid marketing efforts delivered the strongest launch day sales in reMarkable's history. The launch contributed to 30% revenue growth that year. The digital launch event accumulated 270,000 organic views on YouTube and became the playbook for future product launches at reMarkable.
Selected press coverage.
