Last fall, my best friend replaced her iPhone with a Nokia. She’s not alone: Interest in “dumbphones” has grown in recent years, especially among young people. But when Joe Hollier, 33, and his co-founder Kaiwei Tang, 44, conceived the Light Phone in 2014—a “minimalist phone” “designed to be used as little as possible”—the thought of giving up your smartphone was hard to imagine. “Some people had just gotten their first smartphone and weren’t burned out or jaded yet,” recalls Hollier, a freelance graphic designer and artist who met Tang, a product designer, in New York’s 30 Weeks program, an experimental design incubator that asked participants to design a new product.
Neither Hollier nor Tang were interested in developing “catchy” smartphone apps that aimed to keep people addicted to selling advertising or user data. Hollier thought, “Am I ready to throw this phone into the ocean and live off the grid?”
While it’s not a true “dumbphone,” the Light Phone is designed to be easy to turn off. No third-party apps, no social media, no blue light, and with functionality at its core. When I reach Hollier via Zoom on what is, for me, a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in Manchester, he’s preparing to launch a new directory feature that will sit alongside the Light Phone’s handful of other “tools,” all developed in-house: an alarm, a calculator, music, podcasts, notes, directions, and an internet hotspot.
Since giving up his smartphone, Hollier has been pursuing his artistic
Hollier joins the conversation from his sweltering Brooklyn loft. Its exposed brick walls are adorned with his own acrylic paintings, and in the corner is a keyboard that Hollier has been learning to play since co-founding Light. “It was a really big, positive change, probably the best thing I did for myself as an adult,” he says of learning the instrument. He now spends his free time “actualizing artistically”: working on his art without worrying about selling it, taking “excessive” walks (with or without a camera), skateboarding, camping and sitting in the park and drinking beer with his buddies. “I try to practice what I preach and not get so caught up in the Light Phone that I’m working 24/7, you know?” But even so, developing the Light Phone feels like an artistic endeavor. The fact that the project was able to elicit such a strong reaction from people at the conception stage – they either thought it was the “stupidest idea they’d ever heard” or wanted to get involved immediately – “felt really powerful,” he says.
Hollier seems to really have his life together. He has the composed manner that only someone who hasn’t used a smartphone in nearly six years can achieve. As we speak, I’m in the middle of reluctantly setting up my new (refurbished) iPhone, which I finally bought after months of frustration with a broken screen. I managed to keep my old one for about three and a half years. “That’s definitely more than average,” says Hollier, who is “morally opposed” to the supposed planned obsolescence that causes certain phones to break and forces customers to upgrade prematurely. Light phones are built to last. Hollier and Tang like to keep things “honest,” even if that’s not very profitable. “There’s no hidden side revenue from selling data or ads,” says Hollier. “We sell our phone at one price, the price includes all running features, and we strive not to sell you another phone until you absolutely need one, hopefully more than four years later.”
So profit was never the priority, but earning enough to run a business and live comfortably can be a “struggle.” Light manages it by “keeping things combative” with a small, mostly decentralized team and attracting investors who believe in his mission “from a moral standpoint.”
The Light Phone is an antidote to our smartphone-centric world that doesn’t sacrifice convenience. Perhaps it will encourage consumers (and by extension investors) to be more conscious about technology – although I haven’t given up on my iPhone yet.
