Four years ago, Paul Hollowell found out that Amazon was making a gadget he desperately wanted — a camera whose sole purpose was to photograph his clothes. Called the Echo Look, it worked by photographing clothing combinations and using AI to highlight which outfit looked best. Hollowell, an entrepreneur and a frequent traveller, believed it would help him decide what to wear. He ordered it for $200.

Three years later, the company sent an email saying the product and its app would soon cease to work. Some of its features were being included in more popular products, so it was time to put the digital fashionista to rest.

Many have learned a hard lesson about what it means to be an Amazon customer. This high-risk, high-reward approach to innovation is woven into Amazon’s culture. Jeff Bezos, the founder, once told investors that his company was “the best place in the world to fail, and failure and invention are inseparable twins.”

For four years, it sold millions of Amazon Dash Buttons, which you could push to replenish items like toilet paper. They killed the Dash in 2019, after orders placed through the buttons significantly decreased.

Amazon continues to experiment with kitschy ideas. Halo, a fitness product that it claims can tell you precisely how fat you are, received mixed ratings, including complaints that it could give people body dysmorphia.

Why does Amazon, a brand that probably knows more about what we want to buy than any other company, need to sell us experimental products just to figure out what it’s doing?

Lisa Levandowski, Amazon spokeswoman, said internal teams tested their inventions extensively but that, because they were novel and ambitious, customer feedback could help improve them. This approach allows Amazon to make products like the Echo and Alexa what they are today, she said.

Slow and Steady

A television, no matter how thin, makes an ugly centerpiece in a living room when turned off. With this in mind, Yves Béhar, a Swiss designer, teamed with Samsung to design a TV that could blend into the room like an art piece, he said. They took a slow and patient approach.

Béhar said he and Samsung designers had started with making observations about consumers: homes were getting smaller, and tastes were becoming more eclectic. The product developers worked with curators in museums and galleries to assemble art that could be shown on the TV.

After a few years of testing prototypes, the collaboration resulted in the 2017 introduction of the Frame TV, a Samsung TV that resembled a picture frame. It used motion sensors to show art when people were present and shut off when nobody was around. The television has become a bestseller.

Béhar, who founded Fuseproject, an industrial design firm, said he understood Amazon’s approach as a retail company to rapidly test ideas. But “with hardware, people end up being left with stuff that’s useless or doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “In the world that we live in today, with global warming and plastics and waste, I do think it’s something to be very careful about.”

NYTNS