Can You Live with That Designer Cell Phone After the Thrill is Gone?
Published: October, 2005
The technology you own now says as much about your sense of fashion as it does your sense of function. But it’s no longer enough to be a pink, lime green or leopard colored gadget. The George Forman Grill, homes by Martha, and the LL Bean SUV have paved the way for designer technology. Any day now you may be carrying a Versace laptop, a Regis Satellite Radio or the Springsteen cell phone.
The new crop of celebrity branded tech products remind me of a bad tattoo. You spend perfectly good money for something that you’re proud to wear for a few hours, and then spend the next years trying to cover up your mistake.
Celebrity technology is just starting to take root, but mark my words you’ll be suckered into it before too long.
Palm Computing (before it was rebranded Palm One) was one of the first to test drive the celebrity experience. In 2001 they introduced a Michael Jordan Palm Pilot. Now, I might want to look like Jordan , or jump like Jordan but do I care if I “Graffiti” like him? Pre-Jordan, Palm had a short romance with a Claudia Schiffer Palm Pilot, too, though I’m sure which gender they attracted.
Last year Hewlett Packard introduced the Gwen Stefani digital camera. This w as a plain vanilla HP PhotoSmart camera all gussied up with a Stefani-designed shell. Stefani promoted her Harajuku Lovers camera in the Hollabeck video. It’s turquoise blue dotted with katakana and kanji characters, hearts and baubles. Only 3,000 were made available and if they sold I haven’t seen them in the streets, but HP no longer promotes them.
A much better HP idea was the “make your own” tattoo printing kit for the iPod. The $14.95 kit let you dress your iPod in the art style of your musical taste of the moment. Kits came in versions for Maroon 5, Good Charlotte, and others as well as Stefani. At least you could pull off these tattoos when that phase of your musical passions was over.
This year HP is back to using celebs differently. Their new notebooks, don’t have Lance Armstrong etched into the casing, but when you buy the HP L2000 notebook, $50 from the sale goes to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.
Not to be outdone, Apple’s stake in the celebrity market is a fusion of content and hardware. The black case and red click wheel of their U2 Special Edition iPod caused quite a stir in Apple’s white world.. Buyers got a bundle that included U2 music and all of us got to see U2 in the Apple commercials. The limited edition Harry Potter iPod also came bundled with content. The Harry Potter iPod (30GB) had the Hogwarts Crest etched on the back, and came bundled with The Complete Harry Potter all for the $548. Enough to put any parent into shock!
The fashion celebrities are sashaying onto the scene as well. The Ana Sui cell phone from Samsung is black and purple, sports a dangling charm. The carrying case holds a tube of lipstick as well.
And just this week, T/Mobile threw down the gauntlet with two new Sidebkicks, one featuring Juicy Couture (a teen clothing line) pink and one featuring a rap artist called Mr. Cartoon. ($399 each) Not to be undone, in a week or so you should hear about Motorola’s Maria Sharpanova Razr phone.
Of course nobody does it like Disney. This year you’ll be able to buy a Cinderella version of the company’s popular Disney Princess TV replete with a crown of dazzling, tiara-shaped speakers. There’s a Pooh-Themed version as well and the Mickey Mouse TV with ears out the side is a charmer. They’ll have kids’ versions of MP3 players, PCs and digital cameras with Disney celebrity characters integral to the design.
The problem with celebrity gadgets is that kids and adults outgrow them and then rue the day they ever bought that stuff. One twelve year old from Colorado Springs told me that, for her, celebrity gadgets were pretty silly because, “You’re going to get sick of Gwen Stefani and then you’re stuck with her”. Smart kid.
Andy Warhol said we’d all have our 15 minutes of fame, but he didn’t say that the famous people would milk it for all they could in licensing fees. Parents, take note. Being the first on the block can often mean being the first in the junk drawer. Gadgets are too expensive to indulge a celebrity whim.
Which Celebrity gadget would you carry?
No contest for me, I’d carry the Jon Stewart cell phone with George Bush ringtones and the Bill O’Reilly screensaver. What about you?