BY: TOBIAS AND MALTE
Our initial instructions were as follows: Brainstorm all music related products made of recycled wood you can think of, don’t set yourself limits in imagination and put everything to paper in sketches. So Malte and I began thinking, first coming up with different categories of daily life such as kitchen, media, bicycle, bathroom, car and some more. From there we started to collect concrete ideas resulting in drawings of sinks shaped like guitars and pens with drumstick functionality.
Directly after having presented our more or less realistic pile of round about 80 concepts we decided we would follow up on our ideation process by sorting out bad and unrealistic ones and developing the remaining ones futher but immediately starting work on the one already feasible idea we had: The passive wooden speaker.
The next consequential step was now to start research on how to build such a wooden amplifier. In theory this type of speaker takes the sound waves generated by your smartphone and gives them a corpus in which they can resonate way better and then redirecting and focusing the sound into a specific direction towards the listener, resulting in a louder and more balanced listening experience. Luckily there were some selten-building instruction sets for exactly this type of speaker online available. So we started collecting blueprints, tutorials and YouTube instructions. After having evaluated them using different criteria like simplicity of construction and optics we forwarded them to our craftsmen who we are collaborating with.
Around two weeks later we could hold our first prototypes in hands. Following a short series of tests we gave the ok for production, awaiting the finished products for a craftwork fair in Quito where we wanted to sell for the first time. As the speakers arrived in time we were ready to set up our stand at the fair and thanks to our bosses great salesmanship this first trial went successfully, selling a good 30 of our very first speakers.
