Intelligent Design (Or Any At All)

The delight of consumer products that identifiable people have really made

I was reading the Patagonia magazine recently, which we picked up when we visited the Patagonia store in Old Town Alexandria a few months ago. (Which I also wrote about—the building, not the store so much).

It’s a very activisty magazine, with a lot of stuff about environmentalism and protest and what-not. Which is fine, but not really my thing. But there was some interesting material in there, especially this short feature on the company’s repair services:

Unlike the majority of companies today—at least, it feels like that—Patagonia not only makes it easy for their customers to get repairs, but they have their own in-house repair facility. A lot of companies that offer repair at all seem to have licensed service centers, which is probably just as good, but it’s cool that the repair techs at Patagonia are actually company employees. So many things are outsourced and licensed and just not done with deliberation and care.

For example, Ikea offers furniture assembly through an official partnership with TaskRabbit, an Uber-like platform for moving/assembly/handyman services. In other words, you have no idea who you’ll actually get in your home assembling your furniture or how much experience they have, and they’re not employees of the company you bought the furniture from.

Issues like this can arise, for folks on both sides of the arrangement:

While mentioning Ikea, though, this is something I really like: they have a section at the end of the store for secondhand furniture! You can trade in gently used items and they’ll actually sell them in this small showroom. A company competing with itself, in a sense, is a sign of confidence in quality, I think.

And Patagonia also offers a trade-in/resale program, while we’re on that subject. I like this little condition guide they have:

But that’s a little bit of an aside to what I want to think about here. In the same magazine, there was also this feature on redesigned wetsuits:

Now look at that quote at the top. That’s not something you see all the time. This company doesn’t just truly design their stuff carefully. They also have access to a ton of information about how the products perform, because they have their own repair facilities that give them a window into common failures or issues. And those departments—design and repair—talk to each other. I have to imagine that the repairs being done in-house aids in the collection and use of this information.