Xelibri (2003 - 2004)

2003 - 2004

dead europe

in january 2003 siemens announced it would sell mobile phones the way a clothing label sells clothes, in seasonal collections that were supposed to go out of date on schedule. the first four models were designed in house and came out looking like star trek props. the second four went to ideo and reached 399 euros for hardware that could barely manage a text message. all eight together sold 780,000 units, under two percent of what siemens shifted in handsets that year, and the company gave up on the concept in may 2004.

» see xelibri.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Siemens phones were ordinary in Turkey. Plenty of people i knew carried one, the grey plastic kind with the sturdy keypad that you could drop on a pavement without changing your evening. Xelibri was Siemens deciding that a different half of the market wanted a phone shaped like a compact mirror, priced like a used computer. It sold in department stores rather than through the operator, different shop, different customer. more or less. neither of them was me.

this is mostly told from the outside, the pitch was made in January 2003 and it was not modest. Rudi Lamprecht on the Siemens board had pushed the idea and George Appling was put in charge of running it. The plan was two collections a year on a fashion calendar, four models in spring and four in autumn. Each collection was meant to be replaced rather than continued. Appling was quite open that sixty percent of buyers had no use for this and that Xelibri was aimed at the forty percent who put design first.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway. Collection one was called Space on Earth and arrived in the first half of 2003, drawn in house, all curved white shells and small round displays that people compared to Star Trek before they compared them to anything else. in those days. Collection two, in October, went out to IDEO and came back as Fashion Extravaganza, which included a phone built into a powder compact with a mirror in the lid. Prices ran from 199 euros to 399.

The engineering underneath was the problem, and it was pretty much not an accident. in fairness, inside the sculptural shells sat the cheapest components Siemens had. either way. an object priced above most of the company's real phones did less than any of them, on keypads that were difficult to use because the shape came first. You could buy the look or you could buy a phone. Siemens was asking a fairly ordinary person to pay a premium for the version that worked worse.

~ the rap sheet ~

Born	january 2003, announced as a fashion label that happened to make phones
Peak	780,000 units across all eight models, under 100,000 each
Killed	may 2004
Lifespan	sixteen months, two collections
Made by	Siemens Mobile, second collection designed by IDEO
Killed by	buyers who wanted the design and the phone in the same object

~ the funny part ~

The concept was correct and the timing was only wrong by about four years. for whatever reason. Fashion did take over the handset, thoroughly. by 2007 people were paying a premium for an object chosen on appearance whose specification they could not describe. What Apple understood and Siemens did not is that the thing being sold as jewelry also has to be the best device you own, not a second phone you carry when the outfit calls for it.

Siemens had also built the obsolescence in on purpose. A collection was meant to be replaced, which is fine for a coat and unworkable for a device that holds your contacts and costs 399 euros. more or less. Nobody wants their phone to go outta season. The whole plan required customers to accept a rule they had never agreed to.

~ what it became ~

this part i kind of was not really around for. anyway. 780,000 units across the entire run, fewer than 100,000 per model. That was under two percent of what Siemens sold in handsets. On May 2004 the company confirmed it was no longer committed to the two-collections-a-year idea, which in corporate language is the death certificate (cant remember the exact year). the brand was finished inside that year. About twelve months later the whole Siemens handset business went to BenQ. either way. that arrangement lasted until BenQ Mobile filed for insolvency in 2006.

i wasnt close to this part of the story, still, xelibri survives now as a collector's shelf. The eight models turn up in phone museums and on auction sites, wanted precisely because almost nobody bought them and because they look like nothing else that has been made since. for whatever reason. A commercial failure gets to be interesting later, once being interesting is the only job left.

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