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
Amazon can squeeze a lot into a box. — Jared Ficklin was part of a secret team at a prominent design firm tapped … Tweets: @harrymccracken , @fastcodesign , @fastcodesign , @fastcodesign , @fastcodesign , @zeenatmoorad , @otlhogilegordon , @ctrlzee , @ctrlzee , @vcastillo630 , @suzannelabarre , @fastcodesign , and @fastcodesign Tweets: Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken : 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/ ... Co.Design / @fastcodesign : 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/... Co.Design / @fastcodesign : “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 Co.Design / @fastcodesign : 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.com/... Co.Design / @fastcodesign : 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/... Zeenat Moorad / @zeenatmoorad : 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.com/ ... @otlhogilegordon : '"[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.com/... Mark Wilson / @ctrlzee : “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/ ... Mark Wilson / @ctrlzee : 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/ ... Vivianne Castillo / @vcastillo630 : 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.com/ ... Suzanne LaBarre / @suzannelabarre : “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/ ... Co.Design / @fastcodesign : 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 Co.Design / @fastcodesign : 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/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This retrospective closes an arc the coverage has tracked for two decades: Bezos approving Joanne Chan and David Turner's 1999 logo redesign, greenlighting Kindle hardware development in 2004 as Amazon's first major device project, then watching the Fire Phone launch flop while the Echo quietly reached 100 million units sold by 2019 — per its early team, more through ambition than cachet.
The interviews land after Amazon kept trying to buy prestige it couldn't design, most recently with a luxury storefront built alongside Vogue and the CFDA featuring independent designers. The through-line: Amazon repeatedly imported Apple-style tactics — secret teams, hardware bets, fashion tie-ups — without acquiring the brand equity, because its core identity stayed utilitarian, from the Prime flywheel to an AWS model built on easy entry and hard exit.
First-order effects
- The designers' accounts recast the Fire Phone not as an isolated miss but as the visible failure of a deliberate Bezos-led strategy to make Amazon culturally desirable like Apple and Nike — a strategy whose surviving artifacts are devices sold on function, not style.
- Bezos exits the CEO role with the record settled: the cool-brand push failed, yet Amazon outgrew every brand it imitated, giving successors a mandate to compete on logistics and data rather than aesthetics.
Second-order effects
- The Vogue/CFDA luxury storefront reads as the post-flop fallback — since Amazon could not manufacture coolness in-house, it rents credibility from fashion institutions instead, a pattern likely to continue across categories where brand signal matters.
- Apple and Nike face no competitive response here; the more exposed players are Amazon's own hardware lines, which must justify themselves on price and utility against rivals that own the desirability Amazon never secured.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Apple/Nike template of aspirational branding proves non-transferable to infrastructure-scale companies: Amazon's actual legacy, per the related reporting on algorithm-driven management ('Bezosism') and AWS lock-in, is operational dominance that renders consumer-coolness optional.
- The structural lesson for hardware and retail strategists is that distribution and data advantages can substitute for brand heat — meaning future challengers to Amazon must beat the machine, not the image.
The trend: Platform companies keep attempting Apple-style brand transformation through secret hardware teams and fashion partnerships even as their durable advantage remains utilitarian infrastructure.