Branding

The design of THESIS creations was criticized from day one. It went against many conventions of modern design. It goes well beyond the design of androids.

Perhaps the most striking contrast is if we look at the design of the non-sentient androids being produced now by Valhalla. In many ways Valhalla is the direct successor of THESIS.

While THESIS always floundered as a business, Valhalla enjoyed some moderate success for years by establishing itself as the premier company producing high quality, ultra-realistic prosthesis. Their branding had always been extremely clean, almost sterile. With sleek curved lines and an emphasis on bright white, it fit in with the design of tech giants before it, but also with the ideals of the medical profession: cleanliness, brightness, transparency.

Valhalla established itself quite securely as the undisputed king of an admittedly small market: wealthy people who needed prosthesis or extensive plastic surgery.

It served Valhalla well that their brand image was almost perfectly well adapted to the market for androids. From the moment the very concept of androids was discussed, safety was a top concern of the public. And as we can see in the aftermath of the factory incident, a well founded concern. Valhalla had already built a brand identity around trustworthiness.

THESIS on the other hand had a brand that made little sense for its industry.

THESIS appeared on the market around the time "intelligent" became a marketing buzzword, as in Neocell’s slogan "your phone is smart, but ours is intelligent." And though THESIS experimented with AI from its beginning, it was originally an appliance company.

THESIS never made much business sense. It was a mixture of astonishingly brilliant inventors and a design team that could be described as quirky at best, mad at worst, and a marketing style seemingly influenced by Chinese nationalism awkwardly coupled with an obvious nostalgia for 1950s american advertising.

It almost seemed that their products were meant to appeal to rich, avant-garde art collectors who also wanted fancy kitchen appliances. And it seems that it did indeed appeal to those people, but it was not a big enough market to sustain a company with such high research and production costs.

After the fall of thesis, a product designer at Valhalla had this to say:

The THESIS founders were all brilliant — I’m not half the genius as any of them. But I did always feel that they got too swept up in their project, especially Crane and Clemens. I see it with a lot of brilliant people, designers included. The problem with a lot of designers these days is they really ought to be artists. Clemens was an artist through and through, one of the greatest of our time, but there is an important difference between art and design. Maybe that line can be blurred if you’re designing a table. But they were designing androids. My god, they were designing PEOPLE. Sometimes I wonder if they truly realized that.