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Thomas Howard: When we started thinking about anything, there was this idea of “owning” transparency. We’re not going to win the tech race, that’s for sure. If we also want to have a chance, we need to be skilled in engineering. So we can get rid of the façade, remove everything on the outside and go back inside, which is what matters.
From a distance, you are fascinated but things are pretty simple, and then when you slowly start looking at the surface, then the details of the product appear. But, again, we didn’t know what kind of problems transparency could cause.
Problems?
TH: The biggest thing was to glue the two sides of the transparent housing together. We’ve done a lot of repetitions — until last week — to find the right balance. If you do it wrong, you will see glue along the edge. So it will not appear transparent. Instead, it will be scattered. It throws everything out of balance.
We tested alternative glues, different types of laser welding, ultrasonic welding, things that may be more enjoyable for performance, but of course it’s a learning process for us. It wasn’t in our heads [when we started], but it’s the first thing we think about for future products.
Carl Pei: Ear 1’s rate of return is only 50 percent. We want to get to the 90s. We are improving day by day.
Is that why you didn’t choose the option to make your headphones or wallet completely clear? Is it very hard and you get a high rate of production failure?
TH: In Ear 1 and in the case we were challenged to reveal as much engineering as possible. But you should try to make products that are as neutral as possible. They need to feel balanced and not yell at you for “engineering”. So we choose to darken or package some ingredients, not to remove or distract them. That’s why we have this big white block inside the case. But we did everything we could to make it transparent.
CP: Many of us weren’t inspired by the fact that consumer technologies were becoming more and more common. It was important to find a design language that we could stick to. Jesper [Kouthoofd, founder and CEO of Teenage Engineering] he showed us a picture of a Sony museum with a bunch of products on the wall. You saw a consistent approach. Today’s companies don’t have a design focus, they do what’s fashionable every quarter.
The trick is to find something that is desirable, but not different, for that matter. Pure transparent design, wherever you see it everything in headphones and cases also does not meet these criteria. We want to make our products available to more people. It would be a very niche if it were completely transparent.
Ear 1s vs. AirPods Pro
What about all the points? Point logo. The texture has dots on the case. Red dot on the right ear.
TH: We were trying to get rid of jobs we didn’t like. We had to design a logo. We wanted it to look industrial. So … [Howard pulls out something that looks like a large gun.] This is amazing, this thing. These are what they use to mark pipes in industrial environments where you can’t print them. He poured a kind of ink. But it’s basically a point matrix. We thought, let’s let a machine design the logo for us. See where this route takes us. Then we started using that font for a lot of things.
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