Nothing has done with CMF what OnePlus and Xiaomi did not know: divide before betraying each other

Carl Pei released Nothing in 2022 with the classic manual of technological ‘covering’:

1. A distinctive design.
2. An aggressive price.
3. An anti-narrativeestablishment.

But some time later he did something that no brand in his position had attempted: he cloned himself before he grew up. ‘CMF by Nothing‘is not just any sub-brand. It’s an insurance policy against the cycle that killed OnePlus’ mystique and tamed Xiaomi.

Let’s go in parts.

The pattern is known:

1. A brand emerges promising “more for less” and building a tribe with early adopters that they feel part of something exclusive.
2. The forums are burning, unboxings They go viral, people practically tattoo the logo.
3. But commercial success eventually requires betraying that promise: you raise prices, chase better margins, and normalize.

We have seen the same process in two brands dominating that space in two stages:

1. OnePlus went from “flagship killer” in 2014 to sell mobiles indistinguishable from Oppo around 2018.
2. Xiaomi went from being the Robin Hood of telephony in 2017 to having 1,200 euro models in 2021. In 2025 it’s already going for 1,500.

It’s not that they are hypocrites, it’s that that position cultural requires smallness. As soon as you grow big enough to matter, you’re no longer credible as an alternative.

Xiaomi tried it with POCO and Redmi, but without all the conviction.

• POCO was born in 2018 with the F1 as flagship killer perfect, direct heir to the original Xiaomi mystique, and this year it has given a brutal terminal like the F8. But instead of keeping the brand as a permanent outlet for purists, they let it languish with erratic launches, confusing positioning and some constant cannibalization with Redmi.
• And Redmi, although successful in volume, never had its own narrative beyond ‘Xiaomi, but cheaper’.

They were functional subbrands, but not cultural. And CMF is the opposite: it has a recognizable design from fifteen meters, and most importantly, explicit permission not to last. Xiaomi wanted POCO to grow and mature. Nothing knows that CMF must burn bright and short, and when it goes out, they will light another match.

CMF breaks this logic because it externalizes the growth hacking to a separate entity. Nothing can chase premium (and is doing so, Their prices rise discreetly every year) without contaminating the narrative indie.

Meanwhile, CMF inherits the role of “brand of the enthusiast who knows”: singular design, brutal prices, no pretense of long-term sustainability.

It is disposable by design, but consciously so. When CMF burns or has to raise prices, Nothing can launch another sub-brand and repeat the trick. They have turned the inevitable betrayal into a rotation maneuver.

The interesting thing is that this can work precisely because Nothing does not pretend.

• OnePlus promised not to change and it changed.
• Xiaomi built an incredible base of Mi Fans and then the phenomenon faded away.

Nothing from the beginning structures its growth as a fork:

1. If you want to continue being early adopterhere you have CMF.
2. If you want to join us in the premium life, here is Nothing.

There is no betrayal because there was never a promise of immutability. It is a brand that understands that maturing means disappointing, so it institutionalizes disappointment in its brand architecture.

Possibly the genius is not in CMF, but in having understood that the “enthusiast’s position”, the brand that “those in the know buy”, is not a long-term sustainable brand identity, but rather a industrializable growth phase.

Just like adolescence: you can go through it just once, or you can design a system where there is always someone in your business family as a teenager while you mature and start coming home whenever you want, earn your own money and stop hiding your tobacco.

OnePlus and Xiaomi played Peter Pan and that stage is over. Nothing has built a nursery.

In Xataka | Nothing Phone (3a) Lite, analysis: it seems like black magic that a mobile like this costs less than 250 euros

Featured image | Shawn Rain