Here’s an interesting case study for all you entrepreneurs out there: A charasmatic CEO leads his company to launch multiple revolutionary tech products that captivate the press, attract a legion of loyal customers, and earn rediculous margins. If you’re thinking Steve Jobs you’re a little late. The brand was Polaroid and the man was Edwin Land. And long before Instagram or Apple his team gave the world beautiful products and photos. Steve Jobs himself called Land a national treasure and sought his advice during the early years of Apple.
A new book on Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos has been getting attention in Wired magazine and Forbes. The title is “Instant: The Story of Polaroid” and Joshua Raley caught up with him recently to discuss it. See the full article at joshuaraley.com to look at pictures taken with vintage Polaroid film.
Joshua
There are older books on Land and Polaroid, what made you want to write this one right now?
Christopher
I read them all, of course, and there seemed to be room for one more. The book called “The Instant Image,” by a journalist named Mark Olshaker, is from 1978, and “Land’s Polaroid,” by the former Polaroid executive Peter Wensberg, is from 1987. Neither is a bad book, but they deal only with the rise of Polaroid and not its descent and collapse, and needless to say that’s become a whole lot of the story. And then there’s “Insisting on the Impossible,” the definitive biography of Edwin Land, by Victor McElheny. It’s an immense scholarly achievement but is more about the man than the company, and it’s also very heavy on the science for a general-interest reader. It too barely deals with Polaroid after Land, and he left in 1982. Also, none of those books includes any color photography, which is another way to tell the story—I mean, it’s a book largely about taking pictures. You’ve gotta see them!
Joshua
You describe how Land was quick to hire young talent, and for the era particularly open to hiring women engineers and scientists. Did these progressive moves help Polaroid achieve such an emotional connection between its products and fans? What else does it say about the company culture then?
Christopher
Most of all, I think, it was Land’s way of finding smart people in places nobody else was looking—you know, he’d hire new graduates out of the art-history department at Smith and send them off for some extra chemistry classes, to make his own scientists. He also just liked women, in a way many men of his generation did not. And I must say that creating your own experts from scratch and taking them seriously makes them very loyal. Some of those women stayed by his side for 40 years.
Joshua
What would it have taken for Polaroid to transition to a profitable, innovative role within the digital photography industry of the 90’s and today? Where the economics all wrong for an older company to enter?
Christopher
It wasn’t so much the age of the company as it was the particular assets Polaroid had. By the late eighties, the company was invested in manufacturing film in giant quantities, and its executives couldn’t see a Polaroid Corporation that worked without that. They owned all those factories, had all that staff that had to be paid in good times and bad, had all this money going out—and the thing that fed the fire was selling 80 million packs of film every year, or whatever the figure was then. The cameras never brought in nearly as much money as the film did, so the “razor/blade model,” as business-school textbooks call it, only worked when you sold a bunch of film. And once the film went away, Polaroid’s people just had no next great idea. I do think—and their former CEO, Mac Booth, has suggested—that inkjet printers would’ve been the business to get into, because it’s the same kind of model: cheap printer, expensive ink cartridge. They could’ve been Hewlett-Packard in the 1990s—though of course HP doesn’t look so healthy these days either.
Joshua
In your book you describe Polaroid’s hesitation to enter the digital camera business, despite having the overall technology in the 1980’s. You included this great quote from a Polaroid employee who said, “The engineering department refused to accept the bad taste of the consumer.” Could you tell me more about that dichotomy? How did Land know which products and features would delight people in spite of the experts?
Christopher
That’s a good interesting quote to pull out, and I’ll tell you exactly what that guy meant… in the 1980s, the inkjet-printer business was being seriously considered within Polaroid, as was the digital-camera future. And especially in the printer business, they looked at the ink-droplet size on a piece of paper, figured out how tiny they could get it, compared it with the grain on a piece of analog film, and said, in effect, “we can’t make this as great as what we’re doing. So we won’t do it.” They wouldn’t accept that (for example) we look at newspaper photos every day that are grainy, and accept them for what they are. We print out photos on cheap inkjet printers every day, too. We don’t expect them to look like original Ansel Adams prints. Corporate pride got in the way, a little bit.
Land, as far as I can tell, relied entirely on his sense of human nature. “Delight,” as you say, is exactly what Polaroid technology did to people, and I think he just viscerally understood how to push that little “aaaaah” pleasure button in the brain. Same way Dieter Rams or Jony Ive does, in the more limited realm of pure industrial design. You know when you pick up a Braun alarm clock or an iPhone, and the corners feel exactly right in your hand? And then you pick up the cheapo remote control that comes with your cable box, and it just… doesn’t. It’s too big, it’s too busy, the buttons are a little loose in their sockets–instead of being a joy to hold, it’s annoying.
Joshua
Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying that it takes more than just engineering, it takes the marriage of technology with the liberal arts to achieve great products, a very Edwin Land-esq thing to say. Aside from Apple, are there any companies/brands today that you feel actually get that marriage right?
Christopher
I think a lot of what’s being done now in that realm is almost invisible–like UPS’s logistics systems, or Amazon’s. They’re just insanely complex, and they actually work most of the time. Amazon, for example, is looking to start same-day delivery in a lot of places, which seems impossible, and apparently they’ve mostly got it figured out. That’s not a product design, certainly, but it’s a hell of a technological achievement, one that’ll make a big impression on your life, and using technology to change your life was Land’s ultimate goal.
Joshua
Do any of the cameras and products on the market today impress you in the same way the Polaroid brand did? Maybe some of the new retro styled products like the Fuji X10’s etc.?
Christopher
They’re really handsome, and nice objects, but they are not giant technological leaps. What I’m really interested in is the Lytro, and how on earth it works. That, I must say, is the kind of leap Polaroid people were interested in, and I am very curious to try one out.
Joshua
You talk about how Land was good at generating press and public interest, even during the early years with the headlight project. Where did the young Edwin Land learn his media/PR skills?
Christopher
He was extremely confident in his science, and that helped him through. But the showmanship developed later–he was kind of shy and introverted when young. Even later on, he could be odd, unless he was turning on the charm–some interviewers recall that he kind of pre-interviewed them, to see if they were the kind of people he could communicate with. And his PR people always had an uphill battle nudging him to talk to the press.
Joshua
Do you see the future of the Impossible Project and physical film changing much? Will the general public/mass market ever return to physical photos?
Christopher
Not the mass market, surely. Your cell-phone is unbeatable for that stuff. But for the niches of fine-arts and experimental photography and the simple fun of shooting analog, it’ll be around for a long time.
Joshua
Your favorite Polaroid camera/film?
Christopher
I’ve never shot Type 55 p/n film, but I really am amazed at the beauty people were able to get out of it. For my own use, the ASA 3000 black-and-white films (Polaroid Type 107, and Fuji FP-3000B) are a technological tour de force, and they are also exceptionally beautiful. They allow you to shoot like almost nothing else. I mean, indoors, minimal light, decent exposure times, big tonal range: wow. I shot some today, in fact.
Joshua
Any thoughts on the new heat printer technology in a few of the Polaroid personal printers today? Could Polaroid do better in terms of product execution, getting back that wow factor?
Christopher
Zink? I like it. I just wish they’d take it further: bigger formats, finer print resolution. That (I realize) takes a lot of development money, and I know that’s a tough thing to commit to in this environment, but I think they could really go somewhere if they did. An 8×10 Zink printer could be an amazing thing.
Joshua
And most important, when will an iPhone compatible Polaroid GL10 printer hit the market?! (kidding, unless you’d like to make a prediction)
Christopher
I wish I could predict it! But if they do, I want one. A dongle that I can plug into the existing GL10 would be fine, too.
Thanks again Christopher for the interview and a great book!