On making things that last

We get asked often about durability. People want to know how long something will last, which is a reasonable question. The honest answer is: we don't entirely know. We know what the materials have done in testing. We know what similar materials have done over decades. We have some confidence, but not certainty.

What we have more confidence in is whether something is worth making durable in the first place. Durability is a kind of bet — you are saying that this object deserves to persist, that it will still matter to someone in ten or twenty years. That is a serious claim. It is worth being careful about which things you make it for.

There is a version of durability discourse that is mostly about guilt reduction — we feel better buying something described as lasting because it suggests the purchase is somehow virtuous. We try not to participate in that. A thing that lasts is only good if the thing is worth having in the first place. We try to make things worth having. Duration is downstream of that.