Why Teenage Engineering is so Cool
Jesper Kouthoofd did not want to start another company, so he started Teenage Engineering
It goes like this.
Teenage Engineering drops a product.
And the tastemakers in tech rave in response.
It is not the specifications they are thrilled about.
Or the form factor has a surprising appeal.
Most people in Silicon Valley don’t even use their products.
The products though, are beautiful on many accounts.
A music lover’s dream-come-true, some call.
Their launches are in the league of their own.
Sometime it is hard to tell who the customer is.
Sometime people call them a deeply unserious company.
If you haven’t heard of the swedish music tech company before, that too is by design. Unlike other large tech companies, they are not pushing themselves in your feed or screen. In fact, most of their products are actually not screens.
They make music synthesizers keyboard, speakers, games, and whatever they can.
If you have been following Teenage Engineering, getting surprised by them is part of the deal. Perhaps that is the core reason to follow along their journey.
When I first met Teenage Engineering (online).I was stunned by this artistic-fashion company, and immediately felt a passion to use their products without even knowing what they did. The make cool products, and they sound pretty cool.
Turned out like most cool things, Teenage Engineering too has a compelling backstory. Started in Stockholm, with ideas and stunts in tech, gaming, fashion and entertainment. Even a bigger surprise was when I found a mutual connection between Teenage Engineering and my favorite brand Acne Studios. Yes, you should check them out too.
Now hold your horses, as we enter in a rabbithole starting in 1996, giving birth to Teenage Engineering, Acne Studios and more. Much of what I share here are my own research of going through Wikipedia, YouTube videos, Wayback Machine, Old Press releases, Acne Magazine, and B magazine profile on Acne Studio.
Somewhere in Stockholm, a team of five creatives Jonny Johansson, Mats Johansson, Jesper Kouthoofd (who’d later start Teenage Engineering) and Tomas Skoging started working together. It was a studio/agency of sort, and the decided to call it ACNE an acronym for two ideas Associated Computer Nerd Enterprises and Ambition to Create Novel Expressions.
“ACNE builds brands within the fields of fashion, entertainment and technology – own brands as well as others.”
The website domain was http://www.acne.se/
Whilst the core focus of the agency was to do things around fashion, entertainment and technology, they did whatever they felt like they could do, or get away with.
It had a creative advertising agency component, a film arm, a production company, clothing (primarily Jeans), and video games. They even had a film cam on their old website, in partnership with the a different company ikonoskop, and was covered by Monocole back in 2007 too. I am not sure how many they sold but you get the idea. To make ends meet, they did all sorts of design projects like branding, packaging design, concepts for videos etc. Most of their clients/partners were other businesses based in Stockholm.
“When Acne was created in 1996 the initial idea was to build brands, own as well as others', within the fields of fashion, entertainment and technology. Although all members of the collective are independent entities acting in their own right in various fields of creativity, they all share the same vision and culture. This vision combines art and industry in equal measures, whether this is through clothing, film, printed matter or a global advertising campaign.” (link)
Just one year after starting, the team did a brilliant product launch. They made 100 pairs of red-stitched jeans, with a tag of ACNE on them. And then gave them all away to their creative friends in Stockholm. That must have created early fan base and curiosity around ACNE. The CEO Jonny Johansson had briefly worked at Diesel, and after traction with the jeans idea he doubled down on clothing. In the next few years out of all their projects, Acne Jeans took life of its own, and eventually in 2008 became a standalone entity Acne Studios, the global fashion brand it is today.
“We were driven by creativity and we were unprofessional.” – Skoging
“When we started everything, we didn't analyze anything. If we love it, then people will love it. This was the core idea.”
In parallel to ACNE, Jesper Kouthoofd along with his friends Jes Rudberg and Jogn Errikson, started making games under a new company Netbaby. They mostly built flash games and also worked on a project for Playstation called Kula World.
The vibe and approach of netbaby was quite unique even for a gaming company, look at the support page below. It was this sense of playfulness and approaching product (experience) as the game first that would define the philosophy of Teenage Engineering.
Netbaby ultimately did not workout and it is then Jesper decided to not start another company again ever. This decision became the foundation of Teenage Engineering as the opportunity to continue working with friends on making cool things was still there.
I started to feel that I wanted to build things again. I had gotten a CNC machine and started building things again. I really did not want to start a company again. Handling employees, meetings. I had to create my own space, I couldn’t be employed anywhere.
— Jesper Kouthoofd
In 2005, Jesper along with his two co-founders from Netbaby David Eriksson and Jens Rudberg was joined by David Möllerstedt. A mutual passionate for building things both digital and physical, a shared love for Stockholm and the culture, they called it Teenage Engineering. The name was fitting and the logo just a nut and a bolt, they wanted to keep things simple and fun.
The very first project they shipped was making light lamps. But it was their second product OP-1, a battery-powered synthesizer, sampler and drum machine. It allowed anyone to make music on the go, and musicians started to fall in love with it.
The Italian musicain Alessandro Cortini talks about it in his Reddit AMA here.
Teenage Engineering OP-1, which is one of the most creative pieces of art/instruments i have had the pleasure to work with. Live, i use it as a vocal effect and for drones/synth parts/ general fiddling around with noise.
The team was only 5 people and they shipped this beast of a project. If you have worked on hardware project it is almost a miracle that they were able to do this. Soon after, they launched accessories to work with OP-1, and the product continues to be regularly updated even now over 10 years after its launch.
The team also continued working on different small projects in parallel, probably to bring in additional cash. I loved this collaboration they did with the vodaka brand Absolute called Choir and the video they made for New Balance.
The second big product they launched was OD-11 speaker. A speaker (re)built on the original idea (and product) by Swedish designer Stig Carlsson that a speaker should be designed for a regular home, taking into consideration the noise and clutter of daily life. And it must sound good in a home/apartment, and not just in a design shop.
In 2015, they released mini synthesizer Pocket Operator (PO-10), an affordable alternate for musicians at price range of $59–$99. They are sold on their website and music retail stores around the world carry them. I love that a recent version of PO-10 display was drawn by Jesper’s 9-year old daughter. Yes, read that sentence again. And she did hell of a job there!
On the collaboration side, Teenage Engineering has worked with IKEA, making audio furniture. And in 2019 they helped gaming company Panic design Playdate, a handheld console with all the retro vibe in yellow color.
My favorite and perhaps their biggest collaboration to date is with Nothing, the playful and aspirational alternate to Apple. Teenage Engineering was heavily involved in the initial design and creative direction.
Friendship to me is a central theme behind a lot of what and how Teenage Engineering does things. And it is very evident in the relationship between Nothing founder Carl Pei and Jesper Kouthoofd. This recent interview of Jesper at Figma conference is quite fun to watch, and I highly recommend it.
So what makes Teenage Engineering cool? Now that you have some context, you can answer that question for yourself.
To me it is the people, their friendship, the mutual passion for Stockholm, a love for music, games and art. It is reflected in what they do. And they don’t give a damn about what I or you think of them.
I loved this quote from their team member Tobias Hofsten; “It should be like playing a game, rather than practicing a piano. It invites questions, it invites curiosity, and it invites playfulness.”
“To me it is important that you do other things in your life., otherwise it is a circularity in a bad way.” – Jesper Kouthoofd
this is exactly the type of opinionated company and brand we'd like to see more of. which makes me wonder: why are there so few in the world? how can we empower more people to launch weirder and cooler things?