“The products are not the business,” said its CEO.
Teenage Engineering, the company known for its synths, will stop making… synths, CEO Jesper Kouthoofd said High snobiety. Since most of its products are music or audio devices, this means that the company ceases to be a product manufacturing company. It will then possibly focus on design, although Kouthoofd was not clear about that in his comments. The article says:
Kouthoofd tells me that, as part of a reorganization last fall, he announced to his team that he plans to stop making synthesizers altogether. The OP-1 is no exception. Launched in 2011, it put Teenage Engineering on the map and has been central to its success ever since. “Everybody was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I came to the conclusion that for us the products are not the business,” says Kouthoofd. “We can be so much more than that.”
Teenage Engineering has a deep design pedigree on products other than their own. The company was behind the Playdate console and Rabbit R1, and worked with the smartphone/audio company Nothing. It’s also made some famous one-offs like the Mayku Multiplier print earlier and Impossible Camera, along with some IKEA collabs.
Redditors who regularly use TE products were somewhat alarmed by the news, especially since the company was extremely vague about the timeline. Whatever Teenage Engineering does may take a while to germinate, however, according to the article. Talking about an important project “that can change our online life”, he told High Snobiety that “some of [these upcoming projects] won’t be released for five to 10 years.”