Why I Refuse to Design Products That Break on Purpose

The Light Bulb Conspiracy

In 1924, the world's major light bulb manufacturers gathered in Geneva and formed what became known as the Phoebus Cartel.

Their purpose wasn't to improve light bulbs. It was to make them worse.

At the time, bulbs could easily last 2,500 hours or more. But longer-lasting bulbs meant fewer replacement sales. So the cartel agreed to limit bulb lifespan to around 1,000 hours. Any manufacturer whose bulbs lasted "too long" faced monetary penalties.

They literally engineered failure into their products. On purpose. For profit.

That was a century ago. And that mindset, that approach to business, hasn't just survived. It's become the default assumption underlying most of modern commerce.

The Forever Growth Trap

The light bulb cartel didn't invent greed. They invented a system.

That system says: your product should fail so customers have to buy another one. Your business model should depend on repeat purchases of the same thing. Your success requires your customers to keep consuming forever.

That's the mindset. That's the cliche. That's the way businesses have been run for so long. That's the forever growth model.

And it's everywhere.

Phones designed to slow down after two years. Appliances with plastic gears that strip after warranty expires. Software updates that mysteriously make old hardware unusable. Printer cartridges with chips that stop working at arbitrary page counts.

We've normalized products that betray us. We expect the things we buy to fail. We budget for replacement cycles that shouldn't exist.

Why I Reject This Model

When I design products, I start with a simple question: How long can this possibly last?

Not: How long until the customer needs to buy another one? Not: What's the minimum acceptable lifespan before we face complaints? Not: How can we balance durability against replacement revenue?

How long can this possibly last?

Airwall is designed for thousands of uses. Not because I'm a saint. Because I think the planned obsolescence model is fundamentally broken, for customers, for the planet, and ultimately for businesses themselves.

Here's why.

Planned obsolescence destroys trust.

Every time a product fails earlier than it should, customers lose a little faith. Maybe they blame themselves at first. Maybe they assume they got unlucky. But eventually, they realize the game is rigged.

That realization doesn't stay contained to one product or one company. It spreads. Customers become cynical about everything. They expect to be exploited. They assume bad faith. The market becomes adversarial instead of collaborative.

I want customers who trust me. That trust is worth more than any replacement revenue.

Planned obsolescence creates waste.

This one's obvious but worth stating. Every product designed to fail becomes trash. Every shortened lifespan means more raw materials extracted, more energy consumed in manufacturing, more garbage in landfills.

I want to be known for leaving this planet better than I found it. That's incompatible with designing products that become trash on schedule.

Planned obsolescence is lazy.

Here's the part most people don't talk about. Building products that last is harder than building products that break. It requires better engineering, better materials, better design discipline.

Planned obsolescence is the easy path. It lets you cut corners and call it strategy. It lets you ship inferior products and blame the customer for expecting too much.

I'm not interested in easy. I'm interested in excellent.

What "Designed to Last" Actually Means

So what does it look like to reject planned obsolescence? How do you actually build products meant to survive?

Material selection matters.

Every component of every product involves choices. Plastic or metal? Welded or bolted? Proprietary or standard?

Planned obsolescence favors cheaper materials that fail predictably. Designing to last means choosing materials that might cost more upfront but survive years of hard use.

For Airwall, that means components that can handle job site abuse. It means thinking about what happens when something gets dropped, stepped on, used in extreme temperatures, cleaned with harsh chemicals. It means assuming the worst and engineering for it.

Repairability matters.

Products die two deaths. The first death is when something breaks. The second death is when that break can't be fixed.

Planned obsolescence makes products unrepairable on purpose. Proprietary fasteners. Glued-together assemblies. Unavailable replacement parts. The goal is to make repair so difficult that replacement becomes the only option.

Designing to last means the opposite. Standard fasteners. Modular assemblies. Available parts. When something breaks, and eventually something always breaks, the product should be fixable.

Simplicity matters.

The fewer parts a product has, the fewer things can fail. The less complex the assembly, the less that can go wrong.

This is where my reductionist philosophy connects directly to longevity. I want products to be the leanest, most simple, efficient designs possible. Not just because simplicity is elegant. Because simplicity survives.

The Business Case for Longevity

Some people hear "products designed to last" and think "smaller market." If customers don't need replacements, where's the revenue?

This assumes the market is fixed. It isn't.

Durability creates evangelists.

When someone buys a product that exceeds their expectations, they tell people. When that product keeps working year after year while competitors' products fail, they tell more people. Word of mouth from satisfied customers is worth more than any advertising budget.

Durability commands premium pricing.

Customers will pay more for products they trust. The companies that build real quality can charge accordingly. You don't have to compete on price when you're competing on value.

Durability builds sustainable businesses.

The forever growth model requires constantly finding new customers to replace the ones you've exhausted. That's a treadmill. You're always running just to stay in place.

A business built on genuine value can reach equilibrium. You find your customers, you serve them well, you earn referrals to new customers. You're not desperately chasing replacement revenue because your products don't fail on schedule.

A Different Kind of Success

There's no reason in the world why you can't be a successful business with zero growth. Because if all of your executives are getting paid and you're manufacturing products that are being consumed at a rate that you can keep up with and that fills the need, that's success.

I want to build that kind of company. One that doesn't depend on planned failure. One that doesn't need customers to keep buying the same thing over and over. One that succeeds by creating genuine value, not by engineering disappointment.

The light bulb cartel had their version of success. They made money by making worse products.

I'll take a different path.

KG