INTERVIEW > Per Brickstad is Transparent

Per Brickstad the Chief Designer for Transparent (center), along with Martin Willers the CEO (left) and Magnus Wiberg, the Sales Director (right) are the founders of Transparent. Together they started out running a successful design studio, but 10 years on they hit on the concept that would be the basis of Transparent such was its success that it transformed them from design studio to a consumer electronics firm, focused on high end design hifi systems.

Transparent’s mission is to build products that are as much a design object, as they are great sounding technology. The company has achieved its mission by focusing beautifully simple design, component modularity, removing electronic waste and ‘avoiding corporate bullshit’.

I spoke to Per Brickstad in his office in Stockholm to find out what all this means and to learn about their newest product the Transparent Turntable.

Where did the idea of the Transparent Speaker come from.

“I have been designing loudspeakers my whole career. I started at university I did loudspeakers, and my first designer job was at Nokia in 2007. I started in industry learning how big tech companies functioned. The first product I made with Nokia came out with 10 million units, it was a huge scale operation. This was a wake up call on scale both responsibility and opportunity for a designer to take whole of life into account and make a more positive impact in where things end up.”

“We started advocating system thinking and the circular design philosophy that we have developed in our company ever since. That was a starting point for trying to design something that is truely timeless. To transcend time and think about that when we develop a product, where do components come from and where does the product go, we saw so much waste in industry that was upsetting and plain stupid. We wanted to question these norms and start our own company based on these values.”

“We started by launching a design studio in 2010, we quit our Nokia jobs. There was not a big awareness on these topics back then and we found it hard to market design sustainability consulting. So that is when we started to design concepts and put them up on the blog. I designed a loudspeaker that was transparent and including the circular design philosophy, its goal was to blend into any environment. It had all the characteristics that we valued including the modularity and things like that.”

Let’s talk about the turntable, it is a beautiful product and fits with your range who do you expect to buy it, you have competition at both ends of the market?

“Yes for sure, it is a similar type of offering to our other products, we are not a low cost entry level product and at the same time we are not the highest specification performance. We definitely are a design based purchase. Our customers and fan base they care so much about the object – they obsess (as much as we do) about the materials, the details, the craftsmanship of the thing and that is how we offer our products to the world. We obsess about the product, it is designed to withstand long time usage in your home, not only visually but the components and materials and build quality must have that type of longevity. Usually brands that have that kind of obsession, have a 10x price tag compared to us and our products, we are happy to be able to offer a great product at a reasonable price, it is still a premium product but it is a lower price. Most customers come to us because of the design, they see it and become interested instantly, then when they grow to learn more about the product and the brand, what we stand for and what is baked into each product in terms of thoughtfulness, a lot of the detail in the product is not immediately apparent but the thought that goes into the product becomes visible after a while and this creates an interesting journey with the customers.”

“Most customers come to us as design interested but then they learn about sound quality and then they have a service need to upgrade to a new technical format or new wireless standard and realise that they don’t have to replace the whole system, they can just upgrade a module, the modularity model we have.”

“The design for us is a trojan horse because the product comes with a whole lot of hidden features that our customers discover along the way.”

So can tell us more about what circular design means?

“Yes absolutely our recipe for circular design, our circular design philosophy is about caring equally about the past and the future. We do take a lot of knowledge from the past, we use components from the past and put them into a modern context – a retro futuristic perspective. The same thing goes for the actual raw materials, the lifecycle of elements, where they have come from and where they are going.”

The range is designed as a permanent collection, it is not changing or being replaced every year with a new model, rather gradually introduce new materials that improve the recycled properties of the materials on a yearly basis. For the turntable, we now use 100% recycled plastics for the small parts that are plastic. Similarly we are using recycled rubber for cabinets, but it is also about traceability to know, understand and to improve the carbon footprint. That is about where it is coming from but it is equally important to care about where it is going. These days companies build components into products with a really short lifespan, I think the system is broken. I download new firmware onto my phone and then its running really slowly so I need to replace it.”

Built in obsolescence?

“Exactly! So that whole thing is happening and as consumers we have to just accept it. We don’t know the alternative or that we can demand an alternative, it is just the status quo. Whereas we believe there is another route, we can make products that improve over time not degrade over time.”

“So modularity is a keystone or foundation for us, they ability to offer upgradability and repairability for our products, ability to take all the components apart and be able to put them back together again. It is a big undertaking for construction and design, it is very complex every time we make a change. We don’t take the easy path but it means that our products can always be repaired or upgraded.”

In homes today people have hifi systems that might sit at one end of the spectrum with a premium high fidelity audio at the other end comes smart home and smart speaker integration with Alexa, Siri and Google. I feel that Transparent bridges both worlds, you should be able to have it the way you want it to look and also to leverage the latest technology advancements, is that accurate?

“Yeah that is kind of accurate, I mean we are definitely in that niche, we call it design audio. We are looking with our brand to disrupt the offering. It is a category where people care a lot about their home and the objects that they put in their home, the technical capabilities are a very important part of that, we can not be out dated technologically.”

“These days we can partner with technology partners that offer an equal or sometimes better user experience compared to existing eco-systems such as Sonos. I am obviously biased but we can get an extremely useful wifi system that enables multi room playback for our speakers and it just works flawlessly, such a simple user experience and delivering high technical ability.”

“This makes us agile and flexible and technically advanced, because these companies we partner with are deeply focused on their domain. It was not our intention to be a Sonos killer, but our multi room offering is excellent and it is just because we have good partnering.”

Where do you sell most of the product, where are your customers?

“We have a few markets that really stand out, so currently it is the US, France, Japan and South Korea are performing really well. Scandinavia is doing well but it is small compared to other markets.”

I saw that you were trialling a rental program in Stockholm, how is that working?

“What we call everything after we sell a product is a circular service and there are so many types of circular service we are exploring, things like a subscription service or a buy back service. Upgrading is something meant to happen and it offers a lot of possibilities, so personally a subscription, rental or non ownership model has a lot of potential. In 10 years or so I hope this becomes a better way to use the resources when you need it.”

“To scale this will require a lot more people on the service side, we learned a lot from the trial but we dont have the resources to scale it right now.”

So what is next the big product, a transparent TV?

“We did actually think about that, but for now we are comfortable in the audio camp and in theory there is nothing stopping us from implementing our design philosophy on other product categories and other tech product categories there is a lot of potential.”

“We actually have as our long term vision to become a the first circular tech brand, so eventually we should expand to other categories but we are focused currently on establishing and opening up the audio market!”

LINKS

• https://transpa.rent/en/