How many times have you seen hundreds of people lining up in front of a store to buy a newly-launched phone? How many times you have seen it in India? Probably once or twice. It used to be a thing earlier when Apple would bring out a new iPhone. But, this is 2018 and even Apple finds it difficult to muster up a crowd that wants to be the first to possess their newest phone. That makes the long queues seen at the OnePlus popup events for OnePlus 6 extraordinary.

After launching OnePlus 6 on May 16, the company held its pop-up sale in 26 cities — 6 in India — around the world and saw hundreds turn up to experience and buy the phone.

But why the excitement, the hype? The easy answer is that the OnePlus 6, especially with its starting price of Rs. 34,999, is a phone worth buying. But the easy answer may not explain it all. The crowd at the OnePlus pop-up events was indeed spectacular, even by Indian standards where consumers are notoriously picky and where people think really hard before spending anything above Rs.30,000 on a phone. But they lined up to buy the OnePlus 6 and bought it too, something that should be clear from the numbers the company has released. It sold OnePlus 6 worth 100 crore in India in 10 minutes on May 21. It sold over 1 lakh units of the new phone in China in 12 minutes.

The secret sauce it seems is not just the goodness of the phone — that is a factor too — but the sizeable fan following that OnePlus has garnered in the past four years. It has created a community around the brand, OnePlus Community the company calls it, that loves the brand, and occasionally hates it too, but always sticks with it.

The community has been built by OnePlus using a mix of savvy marketing, products that are genuinely good and frank communication. But mostly, OnePlus has seen the number of its fans grow because it involves them all the time in what it does. Involving the fans is in the DNA of the company. When OnePlus started, it sold the OnePlus One using an “invite” system which made the consumers buying the device part of a community instead of being someone who would walk into a store and walk out with a phone. The invite system, which had some issues, was discontinued with the launch of the OnePlus 3, but OnePlus continued with its focus on community.

It also helps OnePlus that most of its initial users were tech-savvy and opinionated, who would go to its online forums and discuss the OnePlus devices. The company created campaigns like “smash your phone” which saw OnePlus fans trashing their existing phone to replace them with a OnePlus phone.

As OnePlus grew, it started giving more space to the community. It made the OnePlus fans part of the launch events. It started holding special ‘Open Ears’ events where it listened to OnePlus phone users, took their feedback. It started organising other events like movie screenings, and in India, the company sold tickets and popcorn to the fans for Star Wars Last Jedi and Avengers Infinity War at a token price of Re 1.

Now, the buzz at the recent OnePlus 6 popup events shows that the fans are responding back with love. By any measure, the OnePlus 6 pop-ups on May 21 and May 22 that took place in India — at Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Chennai — were a success. “This is the largest and most influential global popup event ever held by OnePlus. I am humbled and grateful to our global community for their unwavering enthusiasm. They have truly helped OnePlus grow,” says Pete Lau, the CEO & founder of OnePlus.

In all 26 popup events, OnePlus says, over 15,000 of its fans took part. In India, the events saw celebrities like Guru Randhawa, Aditi Rao Hydari and Chitrangada Singh mingling with OnePlus fans.

The interesting bit is that the OnePlus popup events didn’t start as a place where the company wanted to sell phones. It held its first pop-up event at Times Square in New York because it wanted to meet its fans. This was also a way for the company to showcase its latest devices to people, especially because it was initially following an online-only sales model. “In the beginning, we didn’t mean to sell, but simply wanted to have more touch points to interact with our users,” says Carl Pei, VP and co-founder of OnePlus.

But humble roots or not, sale or not, the fans apparently love the popup events. Mohan Raj from Bangalore says, “I got the OnePlus One on the day it was launched in India. I was living in Chennai then, working as a graphic designer and the minimalistic and simple design is what drew me to the phone… I attended all the pop-ups and the 5T keynote in the theatre mostly because it’s so much fun just to get together with the community and interact. Now, I’m trading in my OnePlus 5 for the OnePlus 6. I want the Mirror Black version. I came in at 6 this morning to make sure I’m the first to get it.”

This is the kind of stickiness that no other Android smartphone company has as far as their consumers are concerned. The only other phone company with the kind of fans that OnePlus has is Apple, and that too has seen the fan following erode in the recent years. And this, the OnePlus community, in which OnePlus has invested so much time, so many resources, and a dash of honest communications, — Carl Pei in no uncertain terms apologised to “OnePlus fans” for letting them down with the OnePlus 2 and the OnePlus X — is the reason why OnePlus seem to have become a company that is more than the sum of its sale numbers. It is a bigger brand than its revenue or the number of phones it sells.