Interviews with more than a dozen designers, many of whom worked with Jeff Bezos, about his failed attempt to make Amazon a “cool” brand like Apple and Nike
Fast CompanyMark Wilson
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece closes a loop that runs through years of related coverage: Jeff Bezos has repeatedly tried to buy or engineer prestige for Amazon — first by insisting Lab126 build a premium iPhone rival around the gimmicky Dynamic Perspective feature in the Fire Phone era, then by courting fashion legitimacy through the Vogue and CFDA designer storefront. Both moves treated "cool" as a feature to be specified rather than a culture to be grown.
The new interviews with more than a dozen designers who worked alongside Bezos supply the missing explanation for why those efforts stalled: the same structure and culture that other reporting identifies as hostile to creative work — visible in Amazon's ongoing struggles to make good games — also made an aspirational brand unreachable. It lands just before the broader legacy reassessment of Bezos's ambitions and his fear of stasis.
First-order effects
Amazon's own design community has gone on record that the Apple-and-Nike benchmark failed at the source — Bezos's personal insistence — meaning future premium pushes start from a documented internal failure, not an untested hypothesis.
Second-order effects
Amazon's path to cachet now runs through partnerships that rent credibility it couldn't build — the Vogue/CFDA luxury storefront being the template — which hands curators like Vogue leverage over how Amazon presents brands.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, Amazon settles into a durable division of labor: unmatched at utility and logistics while rivals like Apple own aspiration — a split where brand equity, not capability, becomes the moat that platform scale cannot cross.
The trend: Founder-driven attempts to manufacture brand desirability at scale keep failing because organizational culture, not executive willpower, determines whether a company can be "cool" — one more data point in the widening gap between Amazon's utility dominance and its prestige deficit.
Amazon is an excellent example of the limits of human/user-centred design. As I explained to students last week: they aren't “bad” but it is irresponsible (unethical!) for designers to ignore how fetishising the individual hurts communities, societies, and the planet ✌️ https://t…
Great article! Small correction: AWS doesn't power Facebook we build our own infrastructure powered by 100% renewable energy https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
A great look at Amazon's design culture, which is does many good things but also commits terrible crimes https://www.fastcompany.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Headline: “Interviews with more than a dozen designers on Jeff Bezos's design philosophy, and why the retail infrastructure, not industrial design, is Amazon's true legacy” (Fascinating, whoever claimed Amazon had industrial design legacy to begin with?!)
The apparent paradox: how someone so focused on user satisfaction to not get design? The answer: one could have taste, but design isn't surface. If there's no depth (research, testing, exploration) and the will to discard ideas, there's no real design. https://www.fastcompany.com…
Amazon's design legacy is complex, but this article from @ctrlzee captures it well. It's hard to argue with their commercial success, but I've always felt like they've left so much on the table because of the tertiary role design plays at the company. https://www.fastcompany.com/…
'"[Amazon has] a very truncated, shallow understanding of people and how experiences impact other folks in that ecosystem. Its a great online shopping experience, easy to check out, quick delivery for me, but very little consideration for other people impacted..." https://twitter…
If Amazon wanted to be perceived as cool, maybe it should have started with its website, whose ethos hasn't changed much and still has a Sears catalog vibe. (By @ctrlzee.) https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
In this @FastCompany piece I share my thoughts on how Amazon is just living out what many design leaders unconsciously taught in the 1st wave of UX: the experiences of the ecosystems/marginalized communities impacted by what's designed aren't a priority. https://www.fastcompany.c…
Where the quirky, 3D Fire Phone flopped, the Echo became a hit. As of 2019, 100 million Alexa-powered devices had been sold. https://f-st.co/geCRy7m https://twitter.com/...
“Amazon will never be a design-led company. It's evident in the quality of the products they ship. And although the design is still thriving there, I don't believe it's fundamental to the core DNA of the company.” https://f-st.co/geCRy7m
In 1999, Joanne Chan and David Turner were tapped to redesign Amazon's logo. “[Bezos] was just beaming, really just beaming—delighted— expressing how much he loved it,” Chan says. “He banged his hand on the table and said, ‘This is it.’” https://f-st.co/geCRy7m https://twitter.co…
Bezos's obsession with customers didn't always lend itself to a fruitful design process. Amazon's true design legacy is its retail infrastructure. https://f-st.co/geCRy7m https://twitter.com/...
Jeff Bezos wanted Amazon to be like Apple, “loved” by customers and perceived as “cool.” When it came to the logo he said: Don't frame Amazon as a company that just sells books, because it will sell everything | The design legacy of Jeff Bezos and Amazon https://www.fastcompany.c…
“He said, 'Where does my customer benefit from doing two-color stationery? Let's just do one-color stationery.'” Jeff Bezos cut the smallest of corners with his own employees if he didn't see a direct customer benefit https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
I talked to over a dozen designers and some of Jeff Bezos's closest collaborators to put together this 4,500-word retrospective on his design legacy. Lots of stories being told here for the first time. Take a look! https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
“Anyone who doesn't like this logo won't like puppies,” Jeff Bezos reportedly said of Amazon's logo in 1999. Extraordinary story on Bezos's attempt to make Amazon “cool” and “loved” like Nike and Apple. By @ctrlzee https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
THREAD: We talked to more than a dozen designers about Jeff Bezos's design philosophy. It mirrors his broader approach to business, mixing outsize ambition with an obsessive focus on customer experience. https://f-st.co/geCRy7m
In 2004, when Amazon began development on the Kindle, it had never made hardware before—and the Kindle project offered Bezos an opportunity to learn how. “He was just incredibly [detail-oriented].” https://f-st.co/geCRy7m https://twitter.com/...