Surface Texture – Issue 33
🐎 Bronco saddlebags | 🛠 artisanal tools | 🦷 tooth AI
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 33:
🐎 Ford announces the 2021 Ford Bronco will release with over 200 available accessories
🛠 Artisanal shop tools are hot on Kickstarter right now, see: Herring Blade and Kinetic Driver
🦷 Colgate can’t resist getting into the D2C toothbrush market
2021 Ford Bronco Accessories
The 2021 Ford Bronco has surpassed 150k reservations after its announcement in early July — that’s a lot for a rock-crawling, non-electric, adventure car! Its hard to say if this is a reflection of growing popularity of off-roading, or feeding off the feeling of nostalgia for the classic 70s Bronco, or maybe a side-effect of restricted American travel (i.e. Americans must look to the great outdoors around them for safe, pandemic-time adventure). Regardless, it makes sense for Ford to tap into the Bronco fandom and accessory culture of the off-road category to maximize the return on these reservations, which is why they announced a vast array of accessories would be launched alongside the Bronco in 2021. The kicker: you can finance whatever accessories through the note for the new Bronco.
The modular nature of the Bronco is quite forward-thinking. If you don’t see yourself as the rock-crawling type, forgo the skid-plates and pick up the mountain-bike rack. Any visible screw head is a possible location to add an accessory, promoting a high level of customization by the owner. The high level of modularity also allows the owner to make future buying decisions unlike other modern vehicles — its difficult to upgrade a car once you’ve purchased it, but Bronco owners could buy the Ford-licensed Warn winch when they’re ready for it.
Standardized bolt patterns and accessory locations allows future “revisions” to the Bronco down the line too (e.g. the “2024 Bronco” might have a new door style you could swap out with your 2021 Base Bronco doors). Overall, embracing a high level of customization will create stronger bonds between the customer and their car. We envision a Jeep Wrangler-like design trajectory for the Bronco — the Wrangler has not changed much visually because it doesn’t have to, it promotes its functionality through its aesthetics. From a business perspective, this is ideal. Ford doesn’t want to re-invent the Bronco every couple of years for a product with a niche market, that’s expensive!
The option to finance all of these accessories at the dealer will likely be quite popular. Ford is making sure to lend the Bronco license to specific brands that resonate with the off-road crowd for their quality, like Warn winches and Yakima roof racks. These are products that are frequently a requirement to pursuing an off-road lifestyle/hobby, so it makes sense to wrap it all together under on payment. From Ford’s perspective, its a way to increase the out-the-door price from the Base model, capturing a bigger slice of a growing accessory market.
Herring Blade + Kinetic Driver
This week, two kickstarter campaigns featuring artisanal hand tools. The first, an updated take on the box cutter from CW&T, the Herring Blade.
The Herring Blade is intended to be kept on you at all times, an everyday-carry utility knife, having a low profile and single-handed deploy. It seems… mildly dangerous… but that’s a trade-off for minimalism! It can’t be minimal aesthetic appeal if you design in all those safety features. The point here is that people are interested in unique and crafted tools, even if they’re handicapped functionally, or are frivolous. The second tool from kickstarter this week, the Kinetic Driver, emphasizes that point.
The Kinetic Driver is a nicely-machined multi-bit screwdriver with a weighted fly-wheel end to promote rapid screw-tightening. The “product” is as much a tool as it is a movie — you have to check out the campaign video.
“The screwdriver you don’t need” catchphrase (reminiscent of Patagonia’s “Don’t buy this jacket” advertising campaign) emphasizes that the Kinetic Driver isn’t really a tool, but more a glorified fidget-spinner created with the craftsmanship of a Swiss watchmaker.
The success of the Kinetic Driver campaign can largely be attributed to the promise of a playful UX, something you don’t need but would enjoy using, more as play than as a tool. The same might be said for the Herring Blade. What’s unique about the Kinetic Driver is that it was purposefully designed to maximize the joy of using it. We wonder if this is a bellwether for shifting tastes, or at least, a search for more considered user experiences — everyone who picks up a cordless drill fires off a few “test drills” into the air before getting to work; the same for that particularly clicky box cutter.
Colgate Hum
This week, Colgate announced their plans to compete with the likes of Quip by launching Hum, a D2C connected toothbrush. Not unlike the teeth-cleaning products offered by Quip, the toothbrush pairs with a Colgate app to keep track of your teeth-brushing habits and overall effectiveness.
The Hum, offered in a few colors appealing to the millennial palate, gamifies hygiene by offering “points” for teeth-brushing streaks, syncing the data to your Health app. When paired with the Colgate app, the toothbrush communicates brushing duration and suggests areas for improvement. Namely, and perhaps the most innovative, communicating which areas of your mouth you may have glanced over while brushing. This heat map of brushing intensity is interesting and novel (Quip toothbrushes do not appear to have this feature), and we’re uncertain how the Hum is sensing mouth position over time.
Note the priority of the “Hum” branding, while the “Colgate” logo takes a secondary role — most other Colgate toothbrushes display a prominent Colgate logo, usually printed in metallic silver or gold on the handle — and you can’t buy the Hum on Colgate’s website.
While not a particularly new concept, it does mark the start of a major retail brand offering a connected product direct to the consumer, while avoiding connections with the parent brand. The Hum has its own design language and branding — companies as big as Colgate can’t compete with the runaway success of D2C companies on brand alone (Colgate has offered electric toothbrushes for years). It will be interesting to see if more companies spin-off sub-brands to compete with D2C products — What if Folgers spun off an electric kettle company to compete with Fellow?
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