In the realm of technology, function usually comes before form. The easier technology makes the user’s life, the more willing the user is to overlook sometimes clunky or awkward design. However, it was often the case that the companies National Monitor spoke to at the 2015 International CES admitted style and fashion were priorities when planning and designing their products. Even Ecovacs, the company that produces the robotic self-driving vacuum cleaner admits it is now a priority in the design of their flagship model, the Deebot. “We’re not just designing within a bubble,” an Ecovacs rep told National Monitor. “We’re looking and touching and seeing what’s going on in the world.”

As technology has grown smaller and exponentially more powerful, fashion and style are easier to integrate into the design. A perfect example of this is Samsung’s new SUHD TV, the 88″ JS-9500. Now that televisions have been packed with almost every piece of technology imaginable, Samsung is tapping people like Yves Behar to design them like pieces of “stylish art & architecture,” as Joe Stinziano said at the Samsung’s CES conference. Yves Behar is the designer at Fuseproject, Samsung’s design team, said at the conference that the inspiration for the curve TV was “a fine tipped blade.” He also added that he the design team wanted the SUHD TV to be “sculptural” and by raising it up, they hoped to “present the product on a pedestal.” The raised look of the televison actually gave it the look of a massive painting on the wall, an animated piece of modern art that could very well fit in the collections of museums.

However, it is not only large and major corporations that are finally honing in on fashion and style. Wearables, quickly becoming an industry standard, were a major trend at the 2015 International CES. Ben Walsh of the company Lyte, which designs smart glasses that film video and even allow streaming of that video online, told National Monitor their goal was to design glasses that were a perfect mix of function and design, “glasses that people would want to wear all the time, no matter the occasion.”

Young and promising companies like FashionTEQ are actually entirely based on the marriage between technology and fashion. Once an awkward marriage, FashionTEQ is proving with its Zazzi line of jewelery that technology can look elegant and beautiful and be functional and useful at the same time. “FashionTEQ, co-founded by Judy Tomlinson, was inspired by other wearable technology, and noticed the lack of stylish, fashionable wearable technology,” the company said in a statement.

“Today there’s so much opportunity in the market for being creative with women’s jewelry in this mobile life,” Tomlinson told National Monitor. It is telling that she just began developing smart jewelery for women in 2013 and has already partnered with Swarovski crystal, a name that carries with it legitimacy and sophistication, for the Zazzi line. Further, words like sophistication and ornate are not often associated in the realm of wearables. Yet, Tomlinson has found it possible to create fashionable and ornate rings, pendants, and necklaces all equipped with the ability to notify a user of their text messages, phone calls, and even allow them to post to Facebook, among common features.

Tomlinson also expressed confidence that all of the smart functions of the jewelery are both easy to use and can be done discreetly, without sacrificing the polished and graceful design. A glance at FashionTEQ’s Zazzi line reveals these pieces are pieces of jewelery first while their function, on the other hand, remains a crucial factor yet its importance is dependent on how smoothly the design of the pieces can integrate the technology

That is, without the seamless melding of form and function in examples like the ability to acknowledge a missed call with the intuitive motion that is simple contact with one of the Zazzi pieces, these wearables would be one of literally dozens shown at CES this year. Again, as wearables in general have crystallized into a major trend at the 2015 CES, FashionTEQ distinguishes itself among the rest and shows itself to be worth the consumers’ time with an obvious but  very unique commitment to making smart jewelery that is first and foremost beautiful, elegant, fashionable and desirable with the added bonus of smart functions, intuitive interaction, convenience, and time-saving features.

By focusing on the look and feel and beauty of the jewelery before all the specific abilities of the smart technology, Tomlinson and FashionTEQ are essentially saying to an entire community of businesses that nothing crucial enough is lost when prioritizing form over function to continue to allow function to guide all planning, design, and production of the product. Tomlinson is clearly not afraid of taking risks like that either, as her company FashionTEQ is focused on purely and simply one demographic: women.

One would think that being a line of products designed solely for women, FashionTEQ would lose at least a large group of interested visitors and yet the consistency of the crowd and the level of excitement and interest proved that wrong. Even with that self-created limitation of gender, Tomlinson had the same diversity of visitor as any other booth at CES and for such a small and specialized company, more than one would have probably first thought. The product’s consistently positive response is almost certainly a reflection of Tomlinson’s shining dedication to her consumers, clearly having observed and listened to their desires and wishes to form a foundation and a driving force in the product, from planning to marketing. There is a clear and present respect the designer has for the end user. That is intensely rare in any product and even more so in the often expensive and rarefied world of consumer electronics.T

It is almost shocking how quickly one comes to realization that intelligent and independent women of this country (and this world) are a sorely misrepresented and underrepresented demographic of consumers. Professional women with powerful positions, even the active retiree, all the way to the average unemployed teenager are all so often inundated, in advertisements and in stores, countless variations of the same products for which larger corporations seem to assume all women are clamoring. This blur of products women ostensibly ‘love,” has almost no deviation and when examined, often belie the countless stereotypes that still exist and are reinforced so casually. Perhaps worse, the majority of corporations and their  products “For Women,” display a company’s complete unwillingness to listen to, respond to, or create products for their customers, content instead to spend on massive advertising campaigns. These campaigns, in essence, attempt to force the products on the consumers, forcefully trying to bend the consumer’s desire to their will so rather than listening to a diverse group of women about what they want and need, they tell her what she needs and what she wants.

It is within that exact landscape of willful ignorance of the consumer, marginalization of women as consumers and the complete avoidance of risk or progress by so many major companies in which Judy Tomlinson became involved in founding and creating FashionTEQ and Zazzi. As she burst forth courageously into the frontier located around technology and fashion’s crossroad, she paves the road onward and in doing so, ensures women are not forced to choose between beautiful and useless or unattractive and highly functional, or even anything in the middle.

FashionTEQ’s booth at CES was actually generating quite a lot of buzz. In a promising sign for the future of fashion and technology as a pair in a marriage as strong as it is novel, throughout this year’s show Tomlinson felt it necessary to keep a close watch on her display models in case any engineers attending were to attempt to ask for a demo or to hold the product as a ruse to learn the specifics of her design and technology. This year, a year when there was more than one fashion show at the International Consumer Electronics Show, a counterintuitive mix even in the singular, it was certainly very smart of Tomlinson to keep her eyes open for competitors. Especially because the future might look to be quite a bit