Is this the most perfectly designed product ever?
How do I define the success of a product? How could I possibly call out the most perfectly designed product ever?
Someone is bound to be thinking of the iPhone right now (yawn).
You’ve seen the thumbnail though, so you may be wondering where I’m going with this.
What makes a great product? Total units sold? Total revenue? User reviews?
There are some classes of product that are so successful they’ve become virtually invisible. Practical things like a pencil, a paperclip, or even a 40ft standardised container. There are quite a few of those utilitarian architypes when you start thinking about it and those are undoubtedly very impressive feats of product design.
But what about something that’s a fairly complex consumer good. And a product with soul.
Fender Telecaster
For me, the most perfectly designed product ever is the Fender Telecaster guitar.
Fender Telecaster¹ 1950If you’re not that familiar with guitars, your first thought might be: it just looks like a guitar. And that’s kind of the point.
The Fender Telecaster was launched in 1950 and was pretty much the first mass-produced electric guitar ever to exist. It wasn't an incremental innovation at the time; it was a revolution.
If it had moved the guitar world forward and then stepped aside for new generations to take its place, that would be impressive enough. But it did more than that - it kept going.
It’s hard to even comprehend, but that design has remained virtually unchanged since it was launched, 20 years before humans stepped foot on the moon. Three quarters of a century later, almost exactly the same product is still one of the top-selling, most-coveted, most-imitated products in its category.
You’ve probably heard of Fender guitars, but you may not know the name Telecaster. However, you’ve definitely seen one being played.
Anyone you can think of in the world of rock, blues, pop, or country will have played a Telecaster at some point. Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Sheryl Crow, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Avril Lavigne and countless more.
To put the longevity of the Telecaster into context, if you think of a product that was launched in the 1950s you might think of a Bakelite telephone, or a car trimmed with leather chrome. Plastic was literally only just becoming a thing in consumer products. Cigarettes were being advertised by doctors.
Nailed it first time
Most products evolve over time, especially more technical ones. Just think about the changes in the way we’ve listened to music just in the last 25 years or so – tapes, CDs, MiniDiscs, MP3, streaming.
Yet the Telecaster has kept up with all of those innovations. Since its inception, it’s been consistently enabling generations of musicians to make music that has ended up being listened to on anything from vinyl to Spotify.
The Fender Telecaster is a contemporary of both a 1950s Telefunken valve radio and an Apple Vision Pro.
Images: eBay & AppleYou can buy brand-new Fender Telecasters today ranging from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand. Or you can buy a second-hand original from the 50s for tens of thousands of dollars.
What’s your legacy going to be?
When we design products our aim is to fulfil a need for a group of people who you hope will use your product. It could be anything from a tiny niche to a mass market.
Designing a product that will still be relevant, let alone thriving, in 75 years, is an aspiration most of us can only dream of.
But with today’s culture of fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and disposable consumerism, we need to think more than ever about making meaningful things.
Are you going to be the next Leo Fender, or are you going to join Amazon and Temu in the enshitification of product design?
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Footnotes
¹ When first launched in 1950 it was actually called the Broadcaster, but a trademark dispute led to the name change a couple of years later to the Telecaster that we know today.
