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Bonus Episode: Dorrian Porter returns with the Vestaboard Note
00:39:03
We talk with Vestaboard CEO Dorrian Porter about what it’s like to build a hardware company through supply chain disruptions and trade wars, why Dorrian keeps betting on the consumer market when the easier path might be B2B, and how Vestaboard is finding its way into classrooms, baseball stadiums, and a bar in Northern California born out of a community recovering from wildfire.
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- [00:01]
A
The desire for humans to continue to drive towards all things digital. There is a true opportunity to just step back and to try to design lives that are a little more balanced. Finding that balance in any product, I think, can be a bit magical.
- [00:21]
B
There is something magical about the Vestaport. If you haven't seen one. It's a physical split flap display that's connected to the Internet, that's able to display messages and missives, useful information with a charm that we love. The Vesta board in our kitchen greets our family every morning with the schedule for the day, riddles, updates from our favorite sports teams, and the best, or maybe worst, depending on your perspective. Dad jokes. I love them. Everyone who visits our house is totally amazed by this thing. Best Aboard is the vision of Dorian Porter and and it has its origin story in a Parisian train station. A few years ago, we had Dorian on the show to tell us about Vestaboard. And since then, we've become even bigger fans of the product. We keep spotting them in the wild at coffee shops in Savannah and airports storefronts in Minneapolis. Dorian is back to tell us all about the Vestiboard note. It's a smaller, more affordable and more versatile version of the original that went from basic prototype to winning a red Dot award in about a year. It's pretty amazing. And it's a story that starts, believe it or not, with tariffs.
- [01:38]
C
We talk with Dorian about what it's like to build a hardware company through supply chain disruptions and trade wars. Why he keeps betting on the consumer market when the easier path might be B2B. How Vestaboard is finding its way into classrooms, baseball stadiums in a bar in Northern California. Born out of community, recovering from wildfire, we also dig into the tension between nostalgia and innovation. Dorian's honest about the fact that split flap displays attract people who love vintage and transportation. But his ambition goes further than retro. He wants to build products that pull meaningful content out of our phones and into the physical spaces where we actually live together. This is a special sponsored episode of Design Better, and we're happy to share it because Vestiboard is a brand we truly love. Their mission to inspire and connect people resonates with us, and we think it will with you, too. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery.
- [02:33]
B
And I'm Aaron Walter. Eli. And I want to thank you for being a premium subscriber. Your support lets us continue to produce work that helps people like you refine your Craft, improve your collaboration skills and become inspired by the creative process of others. If you'd like to help us spread the word, leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.
- [02:59]
C
Dori Porter, welcome back to Design Better.
- [03:02]
A
Thank you. Thanks for having me again.
- [03:04]
B
We are really excited to have you back.
- [03:05]
C
We're excited about your new product. We had you on the show a few years back and in the interim, Aaron and I have only become bigger fans of the product. We use it all the time. But maybe for folks who are new to Dorian, we don't have to go through your whole story, but maybe you could catch us up a little bit about what's been happening since we talked last.
- [03:24]
A
I mean, we're still chipping the flagship product, which we call the flagship now because we do have the new product. We'll talk about. So Vestiboard's 132 character units mechanical split flap display, we like to call it the most beautiful messaging display. It's unique because of the fact that it's not a digital screen. It's made up of 8,448 spinning flaps that you can connect to the phone or the web to control. And so since we talked last, I think we were probably coming up to maybe 10,000 customers. We're now approaching 25,000 customers. So we're really appreciating the growth and excitement around the product. And that customer count's been helped by the new product we're launching. The whole AI wave is something we're grappling with over the last few years. Starting a hardware company is not very easy. Starting a hardware and a software company is even harder. And watching AI come along is exciting and a little bit overwhelming, but mostly exciting with the possibilities of what we're going to be able to do to combine software and AI with the hardware to deliver even better experiences in the future. So between that and an actual war and some trade wars and supply chain, a lot's happened in the last two years. But we continue to be able to grow the customer base. And I think most satisfyingly, the love for the product continues to be strong from customers we shipped to over five years ago.
- [04:54]
B
So Eli and I, we travel a fair bit for interviews and videos that we shoot around the United States. And we keep seeing Vesta Boards in a lot of different places. We were in Savannah at Savannah College of Art and Design, and right next to our hotel was a coffee shop that had two big vestiboids up there where they were displaying menu items and also messages. I was flying to South Africa, flying through Minneapolis in the airport. Saw one in a window of a store there as well. And of course, Eli and I have Vesta boards in our house. And it's fascinating to see how people interact with it or like how they respond even. Like, we had a leak in our kitchen and I had a plumber come in, he's like, whoa, what the hell is this? And like, it becomes this conversation. My kids have friends over and sometimes we're making dinner for them and we have riddles popping up there. And then we just keep cycling through riddles. Every morning as the kids are getting ready for school, the family schedule shows up there, the weather report, what the weather's going to be like at night. We have a beautiful display of what the moon cycle is. It's weird to have a product that is a digital Internet connected device that feels still like a beautiful physical thing in your house. And also like magical properties that when the plumber comes in, a friend comes over, they kind of know what this thing is. Like that sound of like, oh, I've heard these split flap displays before, but how is this working? There's like a magic and a mystique built into the product.
- [06:37]
A
Yeah, I got really lucky because it's not a new concept. As you know, I think the ability for a company like Vestaboard to exist is new because we have access to the mobile Internet and the Internet to control things with which didn't exist in the 90s or the 80s or the 70s. So the idea that manufacturing costs have fallen a lot over the last 30 or 40 years to even have the concept of bringing this into a home or an office or a coffee shop changed. So while the company probably couldn't have existed, the idea is not new. We probably talked about this last time. The split flap goes back over 120 years. In the 30s or 40s, an Italian company called Solari started to build these out into train stations throughout the world. And then I got really lucky and saw one in 2012 in Paris and fell in love with it. And I think for me, you mentioned traveling a lot. For me, I was traveling. I traveled a lot. Back then. I had little kids and it came to me to be fun to have one to send messages to my kids. And it was what you described, the magical properties of the spinning flaps that really got me going and feeling very different than digital because I knew I could put a TV screen and send a message to my kids. But what's the fun in that? So that's going back to 2012, when I first saw it, and then slowly and surely decided to pursue it as a business. One of the insights is that it's inherently mesmerizing. And so you mentioned people recognizing it, and that's true. We have a lot of customers who bought it because they remember backpacking through Paris or Czechoslovakia or Germany. But I love seeing the kids see it. Cause the kids are responding to it. And they never backpacked through Germany in the 90s or the 80s or the 70s. So it's a really special physical manifestation. And then when you can take whatever is available digitally and put it in a beautiful form like that, there's something special about that as well.
- [08:29]
B
Yeah, it's interesting. Eli and I have this theory that so much of our life is digital now, and so much of our life is artificial because AI and software is just kind of built into the fabric of the modern lifestyle. And there are a few products investor board. We also spoke with the CEO and co founder of yoto, which is a physical object for kids that's got a little digital display, but you can listen to music and books and so forth. It feels like there's a new product category here, that there's a bit of nostalgia, there's a bit of magic, and there's a whole lot of reclaiming the human experience. That feels like a. I don't want to call it like AI backlash, but it's certainly part of the moment that we're in right now. It's the zeitgeist. I wonder how you think about Vesta Board. Current products, new products and these times that we're in.
- [09:29]
A
We've seen it coming. You know, there was the Web 2.0 back just before 2010, 2008, and it looked like we were going to network ourselves. And then the mobile revolution came and it was exciting. And the ability to communicate anywhere and for us to have this conversation is exciting because we're all in three different locations. And then the mobile phone especially has taken us to a new era of kind of getting sucked in or drawn in. And I think there's no doubt everyone feels like maybe it's a little too much. And even though there's some movements in the design community and the tech community to go further and say we have to simulate everything and we have to live in digital alternatives, and we're going to live in digital alternatives and we're going to work through our agents. I think as humans, we recognize that that may not be ideal like it might happen. But at the End of the day, I know the three of us would rather be in my backyard having a barbecue than doing a zoom call with each other. So I feel like the desire for humans to continue to drive towards all things digital, there is a true opportunity, and ideally a business opportunity. But that's not the opportunity I'm talking about to just step back and to try to design lives that are a little more balanced. And I think that's what makes Vestiboard interesting, is because it's a product that can help our customers stay a little grounded and not worry about information every minute. We do have some customers who run it every minute, and I love them. But myself, my vestiboard runs maybe six times, eight times a day. And those moments of change, the things that you can read, the moments with my wife or my daughter when we see something, those are the ones that are meaningful. And so for me, the world goes in trends. We'll talk about AI. There's a big movement to cloud AI, and now they're starting to see maybe AI should all be local and how you can get a whole learning model on your laptop. So, you know, I think it was Steve Jobs who said, these things go in waves, right? Like, there's these waves where we're going to probably always dip into digital and we're always going to want to come back and be physical. And so finding that balance in any product, I think, can be a bit magical.
- [11:36]
C
Yeah, I really love the physicality of it, and I have one in my office here. I use it both for work. Aaron and I will run these AMAs with our audience where, you know, people will submit questions and we'll throw them up on the board as a thank you. And they dig that. And then for me, it sort of functions almost like you're saying Dorian at these regular intervals, where maybe historically, people might have had a grandfather clock or something that chimed every hour and just sort of, like, made you aware that time is passing and maybe it's time to get up and stretch. But I think it's really nice to have this alternative, which is I'll get, like, a really beautiful piece of art or a quote, something that just makes me look up from work and, like, realize, yeah, okay, maybe it's time to pause and step away from the screen for a minute and just be where I am instead of somewhere else, essentially.
- [12:18]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [12:19]
C
So let's talk a little bit about the new product, VestboardNote. That looks really cool, Aaron. And I haven't seen one in person yet, and I know, you're just working on the launch itself. So talk to us a little bit about what the kind of birthing story of the Note was.
- [12:32]
A
It was a sudden birth. We actually were going down a bit of a different direction. Spring of last year and in April of last year, the tariffs came in, and the direction we were going looked even more complicated. It was going to be a complicated product launch that we were thinking about. And when tariffs hit, it started to become more complicated and it wasn't fully aligned with our current supply chain. And so we talked about wanting to simplify any kind of product launch. And it came to us, our team, to think about just doing a smaller Vestiboard, which probably seemed more obvious to most people than us at the time. And so this is just over a year ago. We're talking about April 7th, I think was Tariff Liberation Day, or April 10th. And within a week, we had cut some foam, tried to assess the size for a smaller Vesta board, knowing that we could probably essentially use the same supply chain that we had, but it would take some design work to try and get there and to try to get a product launched. We have a great team at Vestiboard, including our head of hardware, Ian Guyer, who works out of Asia. He really took the leadership on designing the Note. The Note is a 45 character unit array, so about a third the size of the Vesta board. And the Note is a great name because it was designed to be something short and simple you could send to a Vesta board while getting a lot of information to it. We took a few ideas from the past and married them into this design. So repeatedly we've been asked for something that didn't have to go on a wall, for example. So we thought the Note should do both. So the Note can go on the wall, or it can be versatile and sit on a shelf or sit on a counter. The frame can come on or off the Note. So on a wall, you might use the frame. Some people are using the frame on a counter or shelf as well. And so we factored that in. So it could be frameless or frame. And then we had also been asked many times for larger Vesta boards. So one of the exciting things about the Note is that it can be arrayed together, so if you take the frame off, you can seamlessly stack the notes together to form even larger displays. And that seems to be resonating. We had the opportunity to put it inside Truest park in Atlanta, the Atlanta Braves Stadium. In the month or so as we launched this product. Yeah. Go braves. There's 16 notes that are arrayed into one single Vesta board. And first bar in California that got them was a bar in paradise. Named after paradise, the city. The bar is in Chico. But after the city unfortunately suffered from fires last year, this entrepreneur opened a new bar. Had dreams of opening it in paradise, ended up opening it in Chico. But they put a 12 note array in. We've sold over 5,000 of the notes under a year. We had shipped over a thousand from concept to manufacturing to shipment. We actually switched. I think we're going to get into a little bit of the supply chain. We actually switched factories during that year. So it was a crazy year. But we are really proud of the product we've produced. We have got feedback from customers now that they love it. I mean, our goal this year is to make Vestiboard Note as lovable as the original flagship product. We're just getting tremendous feedback. On the anniversary of the first day we talked about the Vestiboard Note, we found out that the Vestiboard Note won a red dot award for design. So it was great to get that validation from a very well known and respected design awards panel. And then today we got our first tariff refund from last year. So in 12 months, it's been quite a journey. And we're so excited to have this more versatile, smaller, more affordable version of the Vesta Board now in market.
- [16:13]
B
The thing that makes Vesta Board come alive is really the services behind it, that there are so many different types of apps that you can connect to your Vesta board that can stream in. Like we have brave scores that show up on our Vesta board all the time. And I'm excited to see the array of notes at Truest park because the Braves, that's our major League baseball team, we get college football scores, we get all kinds of different data. Wonderful dad jokes. I think they're wonderful. The rest of my family, not so much, maybe. And all of that comes in through these different services. And of course you can build your own services too, to stream in different types of data. Take us through the process of creating that platform, maintaining it, getting lots of other developers involved in that to make this such a rich experience.
- [17:01]
A
Yeah, I mean, that's been the hard work of a very small and mighty team. Mark Confroy has led our software experience and we have Tyson leading our engineers, about five engineers involved on the software side now, the software goals. It's funny because we started out with the idea of a developer marketplace. So Going back when we first launched, and there was one developer in particular who created a lot of amazing little applets for vestiboard, or Channels. We called them Channels. There's one developer in particular who'd created lots of channels, and we decided that we would maybe like him to work for us and made him an offer to sell us his channels and to work for us. And we decided to defer on a developer marketplace. And we haven't launched a developer marketplace as of today. And so all of this is maintained in house. And for us, it's really about identifying the data sources that are most likely to delight our customers. So you mentioned quite a few of them. We built out a tremendous library of content that's available and sliced and diced into different channels. We obviously take feature requests from our customers and listen to our customers as what they would like on their Vesta board. We try to rally around words of inspiration, of celebration, and then a much broader category of delight when we try to pick the content that we're trying to put on vestiboard. Our model can be controversial. We have free software, we have free APIs, so any developer can come in and build their own apps for free using our free API. And that's really where we see a lot of fun innovation happening with the product. And it's great that we're able to allow them to plug in to do that. Uniquely, we have a local API, which many people may not know, but that allows them to get off our cloud completely, which some developers really value. And certainly on the enterprise side, that can be a request from enterprises to create their own channels or apps. And then we have Vestaboard plus, which is the marketplace of all this content. And with the engineering team and with a lot of times, we're paying licenses or content fees that we have to manage. We charge a subscription for VestaBoard Plus. Our goal with VestiBoard plus is really try to meet the needs of a very diverse customer base and to zero in on the integrations that are going to matter to them. And as we touched on a little earlier, in an era of AI, we're really wrestling and trying to make sure that we have a service that really works for our customers and want to open up the idea that people can start using AI to manage their Vesta boards and want to navigate that in a way that just creates the right experience for them. The challenge for vestiboard and the opportunity is it is truly a platform of vocabulary, of creativity, and so it can serve up Any kind of content to any kind of customer. And the diversity of customers we have, whether it's a library or a bar outside a Boston Fenway park or Truist, you know, or actually in the sports stadium or in a 60 year old author's home or in an office like Uber. It's amazing the diversity of content that can flow through. So for us it's about picking the services that make it simple for our customers to get access to content that can inspire, can delight and that they can celebrate with to make the platform exciting for them and relevant to them and make vestiboard exciting for them.
- [20:16]
C
This is maybe a bit of a feature request, although I haven't looked in a few months and maybe it exists, but I've been meaning to install like a local surface report and I guess if it doesn't exist, I might lean on Claude, help me work with you.
- [20:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, surf would be a good one. An instant push button surf access that would probably delight more than just you on our platform, I think. So I'll take that request immediately. I know a couple of years ago we did add tides, which help a little bit.
- [20:43]
C
Yeah.
- [20:44]
A
But it's not the same as a surf report and ski report I don't think is on there either. So we really do need to get on a couple of those that really drive some areas of celebration and delight for a lot of customers.
- [20:55]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I'd be stoked to get both of those. Let's talk a little bit more about the physical product design. And last time we spoke you mentioned Faiza Haizon. Is she still the head of product design?
- [21:05]
A
She's the key product designer, mechanical engineering side for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
- [21:10]
C
One interesting thing you mentioned again in that first interview was that you are sort of the eternal optimist and you kind of have to be that as an entrepreneur or you're just not going to push through all the obstacles. Whereas she kind of had the role more as like, I don't know if it's going to work or maybe more naturally wearing the skeptic hat. And this might seem like a strange aside, but we had one of the head writers on for Stranger Things a little while ago and he talked about how on his team as well there was sort of the natural skeptic, the natural optimist and a few other roles. Do you find that that's something that's kind of static on your team or people wear different kind of hats, as it were, when you're working on the product? How does that Collaboration work.
- [21:49]
A
In this case, Ian played a critical role in the Note. FISA played also played a critical role in the Note. I think both of them have to wear the pragmatic hat. There's no other choice in hardware that's going to be manufactured. Fisa had a very strong career at Dell and worked on Amazon Echo and worked for a product design firm that took products into manufacturing. And when you're dealing with a hardware product, if you don't have that practical skeptic on the team, that's the projects that don't launch, right? The dream was to do this. No one really paid attention to whether it was physically possible. You know, the CAD kind of worked. And even if the CAD kind of worked and you built one prototype for 500,000 or 200,000 or 50,000, no one could make a tool that could actually make the part that you managed to somehow bridge together. So on that side of the house, I would hesitate to call it skepticism. It's always pragmatism. And pragmatism is also sometimes a pretty important counterbalance to optimism. And so as a team, whether it's on software and hardware, and as an entrepreneur, I think I have the job as chief optimist. I mean, I don't think anyone's probably going to take that title away from me. So I think whether we're designing a new software feature or whether we're designing a brand new product, both are critical. Sometimes I could feel the organization's a little too conservative. Sometimes I feel maybe some of the ideas are way out there that may not be practical. I mean, if you're not accepting all ideas from all sources inside the company, it's not very fun anyway. So finding that balance is just a question of what's the idea, what's the purpose, are we excited about it and can it be done? And you have to ask all of those questions at once to get to an end result that works. And sometimes you're not going to get to an end result that works, but you tried. So to me, it's a very big balance. And I wish I had a better methodology for managing all the occasions that you need to balance it out.
- [23:44]
B
I think it's a fascinating product to try to figure out product market fit because it's clear that humans love split flap displays. It's clear that there's a lot of cool things you can do with it, but the challenge is that it can do a lot of cool things for a lot of different people. And so finding the right markets and understanding what Are the primary targets? Do we go in lots of different directions? If it's useful in restaurants or cafes, so we'll talk to all of them, or we go directly to consumer. There's a lot of different avenues to go to try to find product market fit. What's that been like over the past few years and what have you learned in that process of experimentation and research?
- [24:26]
A
I definitely took inspiration from the thought that it could be something that I could use with my family. And then I've carried that through probably in a bit of a crazy way to say that this $3,000 product should exist in homes and now we have a thousand dollar product that should exist in homes and there's obviously a B2B opportunity. And so do we go try to find or build product market fit in the home business or do we just focus on the B2B side? There's an obvious fit in B2B. You could be a B2B company selling split flaps. That's what Solari did. They actually picked a much larger, bigger format to sell into industrial places like train stations. And that's a clear business model we have and had that opportunity to us along the way. I think part of the reason we've wanted to forge ahead for the consumer is for the reasons we started at the top of this call with just where digital is going and everyone staring at their phones and trying to create a product that says, hey, slow down a bit and take a look up and get a bit more grounded. And I think back to my purpose with my children. That purpose has served very meaningfully to kind of put it through. And I think it's probably been harder than it should be if we just went B2B to be honest. But when I look at our customers, both of you, Aaron and Eli, like, it's thrilling. I mean, to hear that you too enjoy the product is totally satisfying. And if I showed you the diversity of our consumers, you would understand why it's so satisfying to keep going in this direction because it is serving that purpose for so many people in so many different walks of life in terms of directly on the B2B side. So our philosophy, we've mostly been on Instagram and social and we advertise a lot on Instagram and a lot of people say, well, you should really advertise on B2B. Well, it turns out that a lot of the design forward B2B people are on Instagram. So we've been able to reach a lot of them over the last five or six years in selling this product and a lot of our inquiries every day are for businesses. Restaurants, hospitality, hotels, Airbnbs, those types of opportunities. Retail offices. We see a lot in dental offices on the B2B side. We're really watching for product market fit and looking for areas that we can really market into. And some of the ones I mentioned, the Airbnbs, the dental offices, doctor's offices are looking really promising. Another one that's really, really interesting for us that we've just did a count. We're at 99 universities that have a Vesta Board. One of my earliest companies was in the university market. And I think there's going to be a great opportunity in the university market, not just for the Vesta board and for the Note, but for these arrays that we're building now. I think on prioritization, I've kept the prioritization on building along the mission of what I set out to do for my family and for what I think we can still do in the consumer side. And then I think it's about prioritizing markets based on opportunity. And when you talk about product, market fit is how fast is the sales cycle, how deep is the need for something that's unique from a digital display or design. We don't chase fast food restaurants for their menus where people walk in and need to see a thousand things. We need to pick our spots for digital signage. One thing I knew is that the digital signage market is just big signage market is just big on the B2B side. So for us on the B2B side, it's about finding design friendly locations and or guest needs. We talked about it being mesmerized and can really serve as a source of delight for customers and guests. And when we see those and we see that the sales can happen and the pitch goes faster. Then we light up and we deploy our marketing and our sales efforts in those areas and we're going to keep doing that. There's one market that I'm really interested in exploring and I have to admit there isn't a lot of pull from right now. It's not like the other ones I've mentioned and that's the K12 market. So I've just started working with someone to explore, especially k to 5, whether the node itself can serve as a classroom tool. Because there are areas that I think some of the principles we've talked about on this call are interesting, like keeping people grounded. So could we set the schedule every hour with something delightful and a little bit fun that says it's time for this exercise or it's time for a break or it's time for this. That's a little different and a little mesmerizing. I think there's some interesting learning opportunities with word of the day or with math problems that could maybe let these things sink in more than digital. So there's just a real effort to try and take some of the special properties of the display and bring it into areas that draft off of the same principles we were talking about earlier for the home and really make a difference. As you guys know, vestaboard is pricey, so we can't get away from that. If you look at a TV screen and you look at a Vesta board, you say, why is that 42 inch display $699 or $599? Sometimes you can find a TV display for $499. Investor board wants 34.99. Now, if I sit you down and I put them side by side and we pull one piece of glass off one and I pull 8448 flaps on the other and 142 motors and over 1500 electronics on the circuit board, people could easily understand. Okay, I get it. And then it's a question, well, is it worth it? Right? You know, maybe we should just be all digital. And as you guys know, it's not the same. So let's keep going and let's keep the physicality of it being something important and relevant. It's not the savior of the world by any stretch, but it's certainly something that people can enjoy. And Lord knows we spend a lot more in other things that are not as enjoyable and a lot more time on other things that are not as enjoyable.
- [29:57]
B
I mean, just as a point of comparison, we have a 1956 jukebox that's beautiful. You know, it's been restored. That's in our kitchen.
- [30:06]
A
Oh, wow.
- [30:07]
B
We love that thing. And it's right next to the Vesta board. Nobody ever comments on the jukebox. Every single person who comes into our house comments on the vestiboard.
- [30:18]
A
That's interesting. I would probably comment on the jukebox, but I've seen a lot of vestiboards. That's cool and that's nice. Thanks for sharing that.
- [30:25]
C
Yeah, I wonder too, if we've been talking about the sort of push back against screens and just investing more in physical things like records. Aaron and I are both into records. Me more recently. Again, coming back to it, Are there things that you've maybe learned from These adjacent communities, the audiophile community, or people who love fountain pens that you can kind of draw into your own marketing as you try to get the word out. More on the Vestibo.
- [30:51]
A
I know we could. And honestly, there are days when probably people are right that we should. I am a blue ocean kind of person, meaning I really want to force the path for Vestiboard as a inspiring, delightful, celebrational messaging display. I don't want to say that I'm resistant. I've got a funny story about this. I don't want to say I'm resistant to it. You know, we've got some record stores that have Vestaboard. It's amazing that they do rough trade. And Manhattan has four or five of them in the main store that they have in Rockefeller Center. I love the association. Wouldn't trade it for anything. And then there's these other parts that you mentioned, whether it's fountain pens or watches that I think about. I've never wanted to put us in a retro bucket. The funny story I have is I woke up to an email from a customer in Switzerland named Kay who sent me a picture of her new Vestiboard note. And the vestiboard note was embedded behind a business class seat that sits in her house. And then next to it was like, flight control systems and a bunch of airplanes and things like that. And I wrote to the company, I said, for those of you who think we may be able to shed association with vintage and transportation and brackets like me, it may not be possible. Because in my mind, there's no doubt we attract people who love flight schedules. We will attract those people. There's no doubt we will attract people who like retro, and we really should embrace that. And I say what I say, kind of tongue in cheek, because some of our fastest customers talk about product market fit. If you've been around the transportation industry or you like vinyl records, you see our product, you probably like it, and that's product market fit. And then there's a piece of me that just wants to go beyond with what I was trying to do back in 2012 when I saw it for my kids in the train station. Because for me, it wasn't a reminder of my past. It wasn't that I'd passed through that train station when I was younger, and I really wanted to put that in my home. It was really like, how do I create something special that isn't a digital object? Like, you know, how many devices does our family of five have? Two of them are in university now, but among all of us, what do we have? 12, 13, nine different digital devices. And so I still like to see Vesta board make a dent in areas that aren't purely associated with vintage or retro. So it's always going to be a point that I can't avoid talking about. But back to what I should be doing, I should probably be marketing the heck out of the association with it because there is a very strong product market fit to some degree.
- [33:30]
B
To me, you know, the idea or the word retro is not a pejorative. What's behind that is people who recognize the way that the human experience can be affected and transformed by things that are designed well, they're beautiful, they're tactile, there's some physical response to those things. And the reason why people like, quote, unquote, retro things is that there's a materialism that we love that's really special. Things feel special and unique and we live in a world where everything is so abundant and so common. So to find anything that is uncommon and rare and unique and special, it's not something that everybody appreciates or recognizes how much that can make the human experience better.
- [34:20]
A
Yeah, that's amazing. And I think. You know, you didn't mention. I thought you were going to mention the word disposable, because I think that's another attribute of retro that didn't exist. Right. You didn't buy the record player to get into a habit of buying the next one. That eventually happened in the late 70s, 80s, 90s, we started to chase kind of the next new thing. But what you were hitting on, which obviously is a huge. I don't want to call it a compliment, but a huge association of what we want vestiboard to be, which is endurance, durability, the fact that we've managed to ship a product, you know, our Founding Edition customers got their first product in. I think our first one got it in December of 2019, but we shipped our first couple of thousand in the first half of 2020. I can think of one that someone said might have stopped working. And this is 8,000 spinning flaps with 142 motors. And people told me it couldn't be done and we couldn't ship it around the world and it would crash and no one would get support and things like that. Luckily we had a clever modular design if things needed to be repaired or serviced. But there is a pride of that that does hearken back to retro. That is, let's build a product that sits and is enjoyed every day for years. And years and years and doesn't need to be replaced by the next new thing six months later. So there is a real appreciation for what you said to kind of embrace the word for its properties.
- [35:43]
B
It's been running non stop for what, three and a half years or more and I never had any trouble with it. And it's plugged in, always going.
- [35:53]
A
The dream is 10 at least, I hope. I mean, I would love to see them in 15 still going 20. I don't know, it's hard to know, you know, absent the earth moving and earthquakes and things like that. But I think it's also fortunate it's a wall product because obviously it stays a little more stable than porting around things, but the durability aspect of it and then some of the other properties you mentioned in Retro are absolutely a reason to embrace.
- [36:13]
B
So Dorian, as we wrap up, we always like to ask people what is inspiring and that could be like a lot of different things, you know, something you're reading, watching, listening to, or it could be a different experience that you've had recently. What's exciting to you right now?
- [36:27]
A
I'm still very focused on Vestiboard so I'm excited to get to our goal of 25,000 customers. We're getting awfully close. We're about 1500 customers away and we think we can get there by the next six to eight weeks. So that's what we're working on. And our goal is for the business is to make the note as as meaningful part of customers lives as the Vestiboard is. And so I'm going to be spending all my time this year trying to make the note as successful as Vestiboard and really try to drive it forward.
- [36:55]
C
Dorian, for folks who are interested in the new Note or the flagship product, where can they go to learn more?
- [37:01]
A
Probably best to go to our website, vestaboard.com and then our Instagram, which is also the handle. Vestaboard is a great place to see lots of content. We tend to post a lot of our customer stories and different shots of the new product. Vestiboard Notor on there. So a good chance to watch a lot of the content we have and of course YouTube. You could search for Vestiboard and should find a lot of content there as well.
- [37:24]
B
That's great. I just want to point out to our listeners, Eli and I believe strongly we only work with brands and talk about products that we really truly love. We truly love Vestaboard. It is a wonderful thing. My family gets so much joy out of it every day, so I hope people will check it out because I know you'll get as much joy out of it as we do. So thank you Dorian for being on the show.
- [37:47]
A
Thank you too.
- [37:57]
B
There's currently a wait list for Vestaboard Note, the newest addition to the Vesta board lineup. But as a design better listener, you can head over to vestaboard.com designbetter and you can skip the wait list to receive a special offer. That's vestaboard.com designbetter. This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team slack channel designbetterpodcast.com it'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.