Archiving Hulger
I refreshed the Hulger site the other day. Hulger is the design venture studio I co-founded and creative directed from 2005 to 2020. Nothing fancy, just clarity, legibility, making the old work easier to parse. Going through the archives though, bringing together those old assets and stories, it pulled up more than I expected. A lot of memories.
Hulger was one of the most rewarding periods of my career. Genuinely exciting work. It was also one of the most difficult. Fifteen years running it alongside Poke, still get a little jolt of PTSD in between, if I’m honest (e.g. the time a container load of our products got impounded and destroyed by UL because the factory put the wrong codes on our US shipment). We were pioneers in a category that didn’t think it needed disrupting. Everyone had accepted those awful flickering CFLs as inevitable. We knew the old saying about pioneers: “Pioneers get slaughtered, settlers prosper.” We knew the peril of that truth, but realised it mattered enough to do anyway.
Here’s what we actually did: we cracked the category open. We didn’t flip the switch to LED ourselves. What we did was put design in the driving seat, making the category visible, legible, attractive. We didn’t just bring design into play, we made it define the new era of lighting, both for new starts like Tala and as a motive to move incumbents in the right direction. Their strategies shifted because we’d made the space too interesting to ignore. We moved the trajectory, and lighting today is a lot more interesting and present, wherever you go in the world.
That’s not nothing. Most of the world has now transitioned to LED. We helped accelerate that shift by demonstrating that design could be the adoption seduction, the thing that makes people willing to change their behaviour. I’m still proud of that.
That experience, the difficulty, the cost, the clarity about what we were actually doing, has given me a real sense of what’s coming in so many other categories. Energy. Food systems. Supply chains. Waste. Automotive. I see the exact same conservatism, the same resistance, the same inflection points waiting to tip, the same tensions between incumbent conservatism and new visions trying to reboot categories to make way for emergent behaviours. And I know what the cost looks like. I take some of this experience to CLUBZERO and Windfall Energy through my advisory work, and I’m also working with other enterprises to look beyond the logical next step toward the ones you can only see if you engage the playful imagination.
And if you want a reminder of how the pioneer and settler dynamic actually plays out, you’ll also see where Hulger started. Our original “Retro Phones of The Future” were very popular for a few years. Native Union, the settlers, sold over 3 million of their Pop Phone, which took some inspiration from us, the pioneers. I heard they started selling them again and have already shifted hundreds of thousands.