Surface Texture – Issue 32
🥑 Avocado-dyed clothing | 🏡 3D-printed guest homes | 🧠 the 'IQ' suffix
Welcome to Surface Texture, the weekly newsletter covering product design trends and innovations for hardware designers, engineers, strategists, and entrepreneurs.
If you’re a first time reader, welcome! Here’s a bit of background on what this newsletter is all about:
Every Tuesday morning, we’ll send you three notable hardware products that publicly launched in the past week. We cast a wide net, focusing on products that are shaking up their industry, introducing some new and interesting CMF or manufacturing technique, or notable trends within physical product categories. This includes everything from 3D-printed architecture to Google’s latest smartphone launch, but shares the common thread of existing physically.
We sift through hundreds of press releases, articles, and ads to curate a list of the products that count. Surface Texture helps break your media bias and introduce you to trends in other industries — our goal is to cross-pollinate industries with trends to help advance product design at a faster rate. For now, it’s free!
The products of Surface Texture, Issue 32:
🥑 Chipotle announces “Chipotle Goods,” a fast-food-fashion brand
🏡 Mighty Buildings begins taking orders for 3D-printed, pre-fabricated guest houses
Chipotle Goods | Natural Avocado-Dyed Clothing
It’s not hard to find fashion celebrating food — it seems like every major fast food brand is cashing in on their brand power by launching merchandise and clothing lines. Brands like Taco Bell and McDonald’s have been at this game for awhile, so what’s the big deal about Chipotle following suit with their recently announced apparel line, Chipotle Goods? Chipotle Goods has a mission statement. It’s not profound by any means, but the seriousness of Chipotle Goods as a sub-brand compared to competitors’ fast-food-themed merchandise is intriguing. Take a look at their natural, avocado-dyed merch:
The above products are all naturally dyed using waste avocado pits from Chipotle’s restaurants. Albeit muted, the story behind this color and process resonates with their do-good mission and sustainability goals. It would be fascinating to see Chipotle make future menu decisions based on a symbiotic relationship with their product line — maybe annatto?
“It’s okay to be a little bit extra.” appears throughout their merchandise, showing a sense of awareness that a duffel bag that looks like a take-out burrito is a little “extra,” but also that it’s okay (read: cool) to be wearing clothing produced by a restaurant chain. Overall, the branding is subtle enough that all these items could pass on any Urban Outfitters, H&M, or Gap rack.
Finally, a shirt customized with your order preferences. This is an impressive offering due to the vast number of combinations of ingredients, and we’re not quite sure how they’re pulling it off — likely, Chipotle Goods is white-labeling some kind of print-on-demand service. It’s definitely in psuedo-Industry 4.0 territory.
Mighty Buildings Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)
One big advantage of 3D-printing is that it allows you to build things that are otherwise really hard to manufacture. You’re not limited by the complexity of a form, which means you can manufacture some really cool stuff without even thinking about it, or better yet, by letting a computer decide for you. Which is why we were super let-down when Mighty Buildings exited stealth mode with the announcement of their new 3D-printed “Accessory Dwelling Units” that are extremely… rectilinear. It makes sense though, Mighty Buildings is trying to validate a product and grow, not re-invent architecture (yet).
While the forms are rectilinear, we do like that Mighty Buildings has embraced a layered aesthetic inherent in FDM 3D-printing. There’s something natural and unique about the slight inconsistencies in the build-up of layers. We’ve seen this in other architectural ventures too — is “layer” the modern equivalent to stucco?
Mighty Buildings offers a range of small Accessory Dwelling Units (a.k.a. guest homes) that are intended for construction in your backyard. The only “construction” appears to be site-prep (laying the slab, plumbing, etc.), while the unit itself is shipped on the back of a trailer then dropped into place in your backyard. For larger ADUs, the modular appearance suggests multiple shipments are assembled on-site.
There are some other competitors in this space, but Mighty Building’s 3D-printing tech could be the competitive edge that pushes reforms in architecture itself. The “killer feature” is 3D-printing paired with some procedural-generation of architecture: the perfect home based on your lifestyle, tuned to the plot of land you own with consideration of geographic constraints (e.g. dry, humid, snowy winters, etc.), and completely unique.
Cadillac Lyriq
Cadillac announced their first electric vehicle this week, the Lyriq EV. Here’s some background on the naming from Phil Dauchy, head of global brand strategy at Cadillac, explaining the new line Cadillac electric vehicles will all share the -iq suffix
[The new nomenclature] signals that Cadillac is bringing a different type of vehicle to market, one that works in concert with man, nature, and machine.
Hyundai thought the same thing, announcing this week that their electric vehicle line-up is unifying under the sub-brand IONIQ. If it ends in -IQ it must be smart, right?
More on the Lyriq naming —
As for how Cadillac came up with Lyriq specifically, Dauchy explained that the name is a nod to the fact that Cadillac is the most mentioned brand in songs. No other brand (not just automotive brands) is mentioned in more songs than Cadillac.
Citation needed. It’s an interesting angle — designing for rhyme-ability — but it’s more likely to play out organically. Anyway, the car:
Note that the Lyriq is “80-85% production-ready,” anticipated to debut in 2022.
There’s some interesting stuff here; namely, the charging port hidden behind a large body panel. The back seat appears to have more controls than the driver and front-seat passenger, with a center console and integrated infotainment systems.
We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop on what gets cut in the production version next year. 😄
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