The Complicated Design Legacy of Jeff Bezos

We talked to more than a dozen designers, many of whom worked with Bezos on Amazon’s most important products, as he steps down as CEO

Fast Company
Fast Company

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds a new front-lit Kindle Paperwhite 3G reading device during a press conference on September 6, 2012 in Santa Monica, California. Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

By Mark Wilson

Amazon can squeeze a lot into a box.

Jared Ficklin was part of a secret team at a prominent design firm tapped with helping design and develop a watershed device from Amazon, the Fire Phone. The Fire Phone was going to be Amazon’s arrival in the design world. The Kindle was a breakthrough e-book reader, sure. But it was too utilitarian to be an object of desire, the sort of budget device you’d expect from a budget retailer. Developing a premium smartphone could ascend Amazon to the rare air of Apple, transforming it into a company that could make covetable things. This was important to Jeff Bezos. As he said in an early memo, he wanted Amazon to be like Apple or Nike, “loved” by customers and perceived as “cool.”

“Risk taking is cool. Thinking big is cool. The unexpected is cool,” he wrote then.

Ficklin worked for months under clandestine conditions he had never experienced before: inside a faraday cage, or an electrified room, with walls that blocked wireless signals. This level of security ensured no wireless signals could go in or…

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Fast Company
Fast Company

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