Project Theseus: The Company That Wants to Be the Last One You’ll Ever Need
A:
My Moulinex hand mixer from 1968 finally gave up the ghost this week.
Unscrewed it. Fixed the cable. Works again.
The mixer is four years older than I am.
It works.
It can be repaired.
B:
Then let’s build a factory that makes mixers like that.
A:
Good idea 😃
B:
I’ve been dreaming for ages about a company that advertises itself with
“we make the last XYZ you’ll ever need”
(i.e. an absolute focus on repairability) — a company that’s founded from the very start with the intention of making itself obsolete once the market is saturated.
A:
That’s a really interesting approach — founding a company with that intention from day one. I’d never thought of that myself. Thanks, that fits perfectly into my idea collection for my next book project. The question is how you’d actually make something like that work in practice… 🤔
B:
Exactly — feel free to take the idea, ideas belong to everyone :)
Hmm, maybe a kind of evolution of the Bauhaus concept? A physical place where people from different disciplines meet, exchange ideas, and create and celebrate things together. And the disciplines wouldn’t just be art and craftsmanship, but also all the modern fields needed to successfully establish products in everyday life — especially product design, engineering, logistics, open source, and so on.
The company itself — the commercial entity initially founded by the initiators behind the project — would ideally be a kind of flash in the pan. It would very quickly develop lots of different devices and products from the simplest standard components, actually manufacture them, and sell them profitably, while from the very beginning open-sourcing all the blueprints and becoming just one supplier among many. Early on, the company would probably get a lot of media hype because of its mission, but the real end goal would be for repairability to become the “boring default” in society.
The real core “product” wouldn’t actually be this line of ultra-repairable devices at all, but the distribution network for spare parts. Just imagine this: a well-developed international pneumatic tube system that could deliver small items from, say, a hardware store straight into people’s homes within seconds, instead of every spare part needing its own parcel :D
Or even just spare-part vending machines in every hardware store or supermarket.
Based on this conversation.