Meta's Muse Charm bets AI hardware can ride the bag-charm trend

Meta has announced Muse Charm, a small wearable tied to its Muse AI assistant, drawing comparisons — for better or worse — to earlier AI hardware gadgets like the Ai Pin, Rabbit, and Friend pendant, none of which caught on with consumers. Reactions to the device have so far been mixed, but its form factor is unmistakably on-trend.

The Charm’s dangling design fits squarely into a broader shift among Gen Z consumers who, in the post-Labubu era, have embraced items that hang from keychains and bags — everything from lip glosses to hand sanitizers to fragrances has been turned into a bag charm, largely aimed at women. The Labubu craze — sales of the “so-ugly-it’s-cute” fuzzy monster bag charm — alone helped grow Chinese retailer Pop Mart’s revenue to $1.8 billion in 2024, a 7x jump from 2019; even as demand for the toy itself has cooled, the appeal of decorative bag charms hasn’t, and one analyst firm estimates the global bag-charm market will grow to over $1 billion by 2030.

More specifically, Muse Charm echoes a newer habit: turning an old Apple Watch into a keychain or bag charm, a trend fueled by TikTok videos and now served by thousands of Apple Watch keychains, straps, and pendant cases on retailers like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay — often bought by younger women as a fashion accessory first. That fits into a wider retro-tech wave bringing back digital cameras, flip phones, iPods, and wired earbuds, as young people describe algorithm-driven feeds as alienating and say they want technology they can touch and feel.

Like Labubu and Apple Watch charms, Muse Charm lets users design a customizable avatar, making the AI agent feel personal. But Meta’s own history could work against it: the company has settled with the FTC over deceiving consumers by making private information public without consent, been penalized repeatedly for privacy violations, been charged by the FTC in 2023 with violating its 2019 privacy order, and been called before Congress multiple times over harms to minors. Meta says it will monetize Muse by taking a small fee from transactions, layered on top of its usual highly targeted advertising business. Whether that privacy trade-off bothers consumers may come down to whether they see the “devil they know” as safer than the alternative — including AI systems some warn could pose existential risks.

Why it matters

Muse Charm turns a hardware question — will people wear an AI gadget — into a trust question: Meta’s ad-driven business model and privacy record may matter more to adoption than whether the device itself works.