First there was nothing, then there was Hoto and Fanttik

Hoto exists because someone got bored.

CEO Lidan Liu, the company’s founder and a notable industrial designer, tells The Verge she was tired of advising from her consultancy Designaffairs China. I have to build something on my own, she thought. And back then, she was spending a lot of time in her workshop surrounded by the same old tools.

“The tool industry, it never changes, the products are boring, very masculine and very much designed for professional users,” Liu thought. “We can start something new.” So she founded iMonkey Technology, which later became Hoto, short for “Home Tools.”

She didn’t have to build it alone. She knew a cofounder of Xiaomi, one of China’s biggest companies, from when they served together on design award jury panels. She texted Liu De in 2016, asking to meet. He encouraged her to join Xiaomi’s supplier incubator program, which opened up countless doors. She could develop her own relationships with Xiaomi’s component suppliers, and sell her first products under the Xiaomi Mijia (“Mi Home”) brand, in exchange for a 10 percent stake in her startup.

She pitched Xiaomi’s cofounder ideas every two weeks for nearly six months. Hoto’s first product became a three-way collaboration. In 2017, Liu’s team designed a stylish slim screwdriver set with 24 bits from Wiha, a top-shelf German screwdriver brand, and a pop-out magnetic case to gently hold each bit. The product was emblazoned with the Xiaomi and Wiha brands.

But Xiaomi, skeptical of the results, only ordered 5,000 sets for its launch. “A lot of people told us it isn’t going to work, it’s so niche, it looks so different and weird,” Liu says.

“And in seven seconds, it sold out,” she tells me.

By 2020, Hoto was selling five Xiaomi products, including powered versions of its screwdrivers, plus the first tools under its own brand. As of today, Hoto has sold over 4 million pieces of Xiaomi-branded gear — and roughly another 5 million pieces of its own. In the past year, sales have more than doubled.

Fanttik — a play on “fantastic,” not “fanatic” — had help getting started, too.

By 2021, its parent company, Aukey, seemed poised to become the next Anker — the first Chinese electronics company to become a big brand in America by starting with high-quality phone chargers.

But that summer, Aukey was among the 600 Chinese brands Amazon permanently banned for review fraud. Some of those companies were caught bribing customers to leave positive reviews on Amazon or to delete negative ones.

The ban cost Aukey hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, and all its profit for the year — it recorded a net loss of $90 million in 2021, according to public records. But it didn’t have much trouble bouncing back, because the flagship Aukey brand was just one of Aukey’s nearly 300 brand names.

Aukey was and is a massive “cross-border” company designed to sell huge quantities of Chinese products abroad. It operates dozens of warehouses in the US and Europe, ships packages for 700 e-commerce companies beyond its own, and works with over 500 different manufacturing partners to produce the products it sells. The majority of its revenue comes from selling furniture, not electronics or tools — it hawks inexpensive beds, bookshelves, and buffets on Amazon, Wayfair, and Walmart, under brands like Allewie, Sha Cerlin, Homfa, Likimio, Hostack, Fotosok, and Keyluv.

Following “the Amazon Incident,” as the company calls it, Aukey renamed itself to AuGroup, refocused on furniture, and publicly said it wouldn’t put more resources behind banned brands. But what about the 5 percent of its business dedicated to power tools? It consolidated those under a subsidiary with a new brand-first strategy: Fanttik.

Before the incident, Fanttik primarily distributed other companies’ tools. But in 2021, the company’s CEO, Bo Du, rebooted the entire division, downsizing its staff to around 150 people and building product and brand development teams, he told an audience at the FastMoss Global Short Video Conference in January.

Four years later, Fanttik tells The Verge it has sold approximately 5.5 million pieces of gear.

While many Chinese brands never escape the orbits of Amazon and AliExpress, both Hoto and Fanttik are poised to become US household names. They’re at Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart, and they’re all over TikTok, selling cordless drills, air pumps, and motorized kitchen scrubbers that look like they belong on the Starship Enterprise.

They aren’t exactly inventing that Star Trek future, though. Unlike, say, Dyson, they’re not creating ever more powerful mini motors themselves. Hoto and Fanttik’s patents are primarily ornamental.

In interviews, execs at Hoto and Fanttik tell me the same basic thing: Design and quality are the utmost priority. Both say their largest team is their product team, “because we believe the best product is the reason we’ll win the market,” as Fanttik marketing director Zoe Wei puts it.

Often, I’m impressed by the quality and design, enough that I’m giving out mini Hoto spin scrubbers this Christmas and am seriously considering a Fanttik vacuum. But after trying a wide selection of their gear, I’m not always convinced these “design-first” companies think their flashy ideas through.

The biggest selling point of Hoto’s Snapbloq is the magnets. You can snap a miniature drill, rotary tool, and screwdriver kit together to carry around like a miniature sci-fi tool chest. But Hoto’s magnets simply aren’t strong enough to hold the weight of these tools together. Liu tells me more Snapbloqs with upgraded magnets are coming, but it’s a surprising oversight.

I also quickly stopped using Fanttik’s electric scissors I keep seeing all over social media because they often get stuck; I almost always need to reach for a utility knife too. The company’s already started selling an upgraded version to address jams.

Hoto’s cordless leaf blower, an iF Gold Design Award winner, left me scratching my head the most. It transfers buzzy vibration to my hands, produces a shrill whine, and isn’t as powerful as the competition. When the leaves began to hit the pavement this fall, I discovered my unit no longer powers on. Liu admits that the battery was “not strong enough” and says Hoto will replace them immediately when customers ask.

Both Hoto and Fanttik execs say they don’t compete with one another. Yet I’m dead certain these companies are competitors — each stealing the other’s good ideas as fast as they can.

In 2023, for example, Hoto released the “Compressed Air Capsule,” a design striking and clever enough that the Museum of Modern Art added it to its purchasable collection, and one Indiegogo campaign tried to pass off the idea as its own. It’s a compact vacuum, air duster, and inflator all in one, letting you attach nozzles and filters at either end to suck or blow, respectively. At the time, Fanttik’s rival compact vacuum could only suck — but its very next model was bidirectional like Hoto’s.

When I ask Wei, the marketing director at Fanttik, why it markets its handheld vacuums to car owners rather than for the home, she says it’s because the compact gadgets don’t have enough room for a home’s dirt. I quickly find Hoto’s design is even weaker that way — constantly unscrewing and emptying its tiny bin is a chore, not to mention how its nozzle frequently falls out.

A few months later, Hoto introduced its first “autocare” vacuum with a larger dirt compartment that flips open with the press of a button. It’s almost exactly like Fanttik’s design, and with a far more secure nozzle.

One day, I noticed Hoto had introduced its own version of the Fanttik electric scissors, and Fanttik suddenly had a cordless leaf blower and a collection of motorized kitchen scrubbers like Hoto. This spring, both companies released their Dremel-like miniature rotary tools around the same time; this fall, they both launched pivoting spin scrubbers that let you change your angle of attack with the push of a button.

One of the open secrets to Fanttik’s success is paying for reach. It spends millions to sponsor NASCAR drivers, UFC fighters, and NBA teams to build its brand — and it’s attracted a veritable army of over 31,000 TikTok creators competing to make its next screwdriver look like the coolest thing ever.

This January, Fanttik CEO Bo Du revealed that 30 percent of the company’s sales come from TikTok alone. In just two years, it sold $25 million in tools that way. As of today, that number may be as high as $40 million, analytics company FastMoss estimates. The overwhelming majority of those sales and views come from creators, not Fanttik’s own channel.

In one particularly successful video, a bearded man rushes the camera wide-eyed — “Ladies, mothers, wives: stop!” — before telling them to buy a Fanttik screwdriver for their husband’s or father’s next Christmas present. The video got 21 million views and sold 13,000 screwdrivers, according to FastMoss estimates. (The caption does not indicate that it’s a paid ad.)

In another video that sold an estimated 7,000 air pumps, a man pretends to rescue a lady whose Ford F-150 has “broken down” by handing her a Fanttik tire inflator. Never mind that her tire is already fully inflated before they begin: 24 million views, 7,000 estimated sales. (Again, no advertising disclosure, though TikTok does display an “Eligible for Commission” tag on such videos.)

While both men seem to be equal-opportunity gadget influencers, Fanttik’s most successful TikTok salesperson has a different strategy: WrappedOfficial posts the same basic Fanttik vacuum and screwdriver videos again and again, but with tweaks. Many get just a few hundred views, but enough strike TikTok algorithm gold that the channel generated $2 million in sales across 51,000 orders, according to FastMoss estimates.

Fanttik offers 6 to 8 percent commission on most of its products; TikTok creators can earn roughly $3 to $5 per sale. That means a single viral video could bring in tens of thousands of dollars for its creator.

It’s enough incentive that new Fanttik videos now hit TikTok multiple times an hour, and it’s relatively cheap for the company to maintain: The company has just 30 staffers dedicated to TikTok, yet over 90 percent of Fanttik’s 1.1 billion views on the platform come from creators, brand manager Josh Shi tells me.

When I ask Hoto’s founder whether she plans to commission TikTok creators too, she immediately says yes — it’s part of the plan for 2026. Liu says, “We’ll do much more. Our competitor Fanttik is doing very well, their marketing skill is much better. We’re building a marketing team, sales team, brand team, so we will improve. We will do more.”

While they might seem similar, Fanttik and Hoto don’t operate quite the same way. Thanks in part to the Xiaomi partnership, China is one of Hoto’s biggest markets; Fanttik primarily sells to North America and is just beginning to experiment in its home country.

They build their overseas reputations quite differently, too: While Fanttik is always telling the world about its sports sponsorships, Hoto only issues an English press release when it has yet another design award to share — 20 iF Design Awards, 15 Red Dot awards, and 17 of Japan’s Good Design Awards at last count.

Those accolades helped Hoto break into the United States. Liu says her team knew it was time to go global once trendsetting fashion brand Supreme and the Museum of Modern Art reached out to Hoto.

Even Fanttik seems impressed with Hoto’s design chops. “Hoto’s design is quite good,” says Wei, the company’s marketing director. “Maybe customers who buy Hoto care more about the design […] customers who buy our product maybe care more about the power.”

But Fanttik has the resources to pursue design awards, too. The company tells me it has around 1,000 employees, nearly four times as many as Hoto. While some of its earliest successes (tire inflators) were at least partially designed by a different company, iRiding, Fanttik’s in-house team has racked up many iF Design Awards and Red Dot awards of its own.

Still, it sometimes feels like Fanttik is focused on volume rather than taste. It sells five different mini electric screwdrivers, six full-size versions, and four pistol-grip drivers, so many that the company publishes a “shopping guide” to help buyers tell them apart.

To be everything to everyone, it also sells 12 different air pumps — not counting the pumps that double as vacuums — by designating some of them for compact cars, some SUVs, some pickup trucks, some just for bicycle tires, and some for “outdoor enthusiasts.”

And those categories are just the start: It sells kiddie ride-ons, a robotic pool cleaner, a mini chainsaw, and an array of camping tents and tables, too.

It’s also aping Dyson with its own versions of the Supersonic hair dryer and Airwrap hairstyler — though my family didn’t find Fanttik’s hair dryer any better at drying than the other Dyson knockoff we already own.

Hoto, meanwhile, has fewer than 35 products on its entire website and a staff of roughly 300, whom Liu tasks with a narrower remit. “We don’t touch food,” she says, telling me how Hoto once canceled a line of kitchen products, including a blender; won’t do a yard trimmer because it’s too much of a pro tool; and canceled some 40V power tools because they were too heavy for everyday use.

“Tool companies cannibalize themselves,” she says. “We define ourselves more as everyday home tools.” Liu explained her team learned to focus after many previous failures: They were tempted to produce all sorts of products for Xiaomi’s storefront, including an award-winning set of nail clippers, a frying pan, even a flatware set, but decided to stick to tools once she launched the Hoto brand. “We didn’t have the certainty of our strategy and our goal.”

While the companies claim they don’t compete, Hoto and Fanttik admit they’ve crossed paths. Hoto says it partnered with Fanttik early on to learn how to sell on Amazon, and both say they respect one another to this day. “We are thankful for having Fanttik, we can learn from them,” Liu says.