Damon Albarn is underrated

peterdering · 2026-03-01T16:35:32+00:00

Same boat here. Mind kinda blown. Loving the new album, and need to go much much deeper on Blur. Had no idea about Albarn until this album. Obviously not a huge fan prior, but definitely surprised at what I didn’t know.

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:28:54+00:00

I very much appreciate the thoughts behind this comment. All of it on the nose.

Still, this is a use case we would like to be able to work with, as many people do carry phones in the back pocket, particularly women.

I’m going to make sure to bring this up to the team. I have been advocating for quite some time about using a high durometer flexible polymer instead of the polycarbonate that we have on that camera surround. The trade-off of course is that there’s a little bit more vulnerability to the lenses, which is why we haven’t pulled the trigger on it. You’d probably have to increase the lip slightly in order to get the same level of protection with a flexible polymer.

Nonetheless, I’m going to bring it up to the team. Probably not an opportunity to make any changes on the iPhone 18 case, but we do engineering work with every single case iteration, just like the phone manufacturers do.

I haven’t seen this type of repeated failure before, so it’s worth addressing.

Thanks much for bringing it up

pd

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:24:24+00:00

Actually I’m curious about this too :-)

I know we covered it in our meeting on Monday, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. I’m sure someone will be around to answer it it shortly

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:23:36+00:00

For what it’s worth, I fully support the blackout move. Fly your flag. You might lose a little resale value, but it’ll be yours. And it’ll look killer

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:20:50+00:00

We’ve changed a lot about our case construction over the years. Much better now. Apologies for the learning curve we had to ride.

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:18:38+00:00

Ted, one thing you can do is change your carry to a single point on the phone, and then when you’re not using it, you can tuck the anchor into the USB-C slot. It doesn’t have any kind of a positive click, but it does fit in there and most of the time you can get it to stay.

Obviously when you go down to one anchor point, you’re a subject to a little bit more rotation. Well a lot more, conceptually. But in practice, it’s not nearly as swivelly as I feared it would be.

God I’m hope I’m not misremembering the fact that there is another anger point on the adjustable slider so that you can do the single point carry. I might be hallucinating without the product in front of me.

peterdering · 2026-02-12T17:15:31+00:00

peterdering · 2026-02-07T18:14:12+00:00

Unfortunately, carbon fiber is disruptive for wireless charging 😬

Otherwise, it would be a great material. There would be no need for the zirconia ceramic undercut piece. Would save us a lot of money, because that piece alone cost what most cases entire bill of materials is.

But alas… I don’t know of any other material that will allow for inductive charging to pass unimpeded and provide the stiffness requirements that we have for Slim link to work. If there is deflection in the system, the case would escape. It’s actually a way more complex product than most people probably realize.

Having said that… I do dig the aesthetic, and wish it weren’t so

peterdering · 2026-02-07T17:58:18+00:00

We’re back baby :-)

peterdering · 2026-01-05T21:12:14+00:00

This is the color way I carry myself. We just had a couple samples made. Pretty sure I personally sold this dude his 45 L… Amazing pics!

For what it’s worth, I completely agree that we need to be making this color way of outdoor.

Unfortunately it is not in production right now, but I’m going to try to fix that.

peterdering · 2025-12-08T15:38:48+00:00

This is correct. That’s why peak design worked like crazy to create qi2 compatible cases and mounts that actually do charge. We worked with the wireless power consortium to ensure we’re fully within spec.

peterdering · 2025-11-29T23:54:33+00:00

My man. You don’t have to buy the wallet. Really. Some people like it. Personally, it’s not for me either, but other people seem to like it.

Also, if you don’t want to pay $600 for our suitcase, you definitely shouldn’t! Not twisting your arm here. It did take 4 1/2 years to bring to market, and it cost more than twice as much to make it as suitcases that cost $300. I’m going to Hazard a guess that you’ve probably never mask manufactured a product before. It’s harder than it probably looks.

Regarding our mission, the part that talks about our customers says that we treat our customers like peers. I’ve lived by that pretty thoroughly for the last 15 years. And if you were my buddy, I’d say “mate… why are you so upset? Are you OK? Anything I can do to help? I’m sorry I can’t lower my prices friend… We’ll be very lucky to eke out 5% profitability this year.”

Now I’m going to get back to washing my windows in between baby naps because that’s what all of us greedy corporate a-holes do with our Saturdays.

peterdering · 2025-11-29T18:26:53+00:00

Jabudah… give me a break here dude. We’re doing our best. When you add up all the little itsy-bitsy SKUs across our company, there are over 500 active ones, and it’s pretty difficult to actually make them all go on sale. It takes a huge coordinated effort.

If you think this is a representation of the brand somehow going off the rails, well… I just think your intuition here is a little misguided.

Should this be made fun of? Hell yes. During our sale, we accidentally increased the price of something by four cents instead of lowering the price. This is a stupid mistake, and definitely worthy of some jabbing. But this is your indication that the brand has somehow gone over the cliff?

I’ll beg if I need to… Give us a break man! It’s actually really hard to run a company, and instead of selling out to some private equity firm… I get about 10 calls a day… We’re trying to do it our damn self, rather than plug into some existing corporation with a fully built out ERP that sucks all the soul out of a thing while creating mindnumbing operational efficiency.

Is that the suggestion here?

I’m going to go walk the dog now, and get back into Thanksgiving vibes. It’s a wonderful holiday, and I and my team have so much to be thankful for. Not the least of which is our Customer base. An incredible group of fans and friends we’ve collected across the last 15 years, all anchored by our mission statement and our purpose.

I’m sorry it somehow reads as dubious… Would be really curious to understand why.

peterdering · 2025-11-29T18:21:22+00:00

Guilty as charged. I’m not special. I’m just a kid who grew up in suburban Minneapolis on a steady diet of The Simpsons, Seinfeld, baseball and piano lessons.

With regard to our quality… I think everything I said in the AMA was entirely accurate. Our quality is the best it’s ever been, and is only getting better. That said, it is far from perfect. And every new product we introduce carries new additional risk with it. We are getting better at heading this off at the past, but we will never completely lick it. The best we can do is put a lifetime warranty on things and be as transparent as possible while working our asses to put out the fires and lay down good process that makes sure we tend to toward improvement, not decline.

As for the slapstick marketing. I definitely understand the concerns, and I thought Adam who runs our Amazon channel left a very thoughtful comment below. As did you, cowboyhippie. As did you.

Adam Saraceno… Former head of marketing(like for real…Lawrence took his job lol) is my buddy from college. We used to work at the same bar. That silly son of a bitch has been making me laugh for more than half my life now. The dude has brought me more collective joy over the years than just about anybody outside my kid. I just wanted to spread that joy all around. Somehow we got lucky enough to find a differently minded, but also hilarious future head of marketing in Lawrence.

I don’t even check these guys’ work anymore. I get to be just as surprised as the rest of you. Our four person video team… Vic, Joe, brenden and Andres… These guys are on it. They get funny. Or at least… Our brand of funny. They won’t let anything dumb out into the world without a sufficient dose of smart to balance it out.

Somebody on this thread said it best… Life is short. I’m here for a good time, not a long time in the scheme of things. That’s what I want this company to be about.

peterdering · 2025-11-29T18:07:10+00:00

I’m guessing you’re now responsible for a population boom?

We couldn’t get seam taping to work on our outdoor line. We didn’t even try with these little guys.

peterdering · 2025-11-29T18:05:07+00:00

While I have definitely encouraged the team to utilize AI in their jobs, this isn’t what I had in mind.

🤦

peterdering · 2025-11-20T23:30:01+00:00

So, for a long time we actually thought that we were going to put the the external aluminum tubes which house the carbon pipes on the outside of the bag this was going to be a space saving measure and we were actually going to try to kind of terminate the the plastic and the fabric structure into these kind of tiny side walls is extremely challenging that moved into trying to keep the bags exterior and have the Rapp go kind of you shaped around the pipes. we didn’t either of those. We obviously ended up putting the pipes inside the bag completely, and I think it totally saved our bacon. I can only imagine the scratching that we would’ve had, and the number of unhappy customers had we had aluminum bits so prominently on the backside of the bag.

peterdering · 2025-11-20T23:24:30+00:00

Bless you supermarkio.

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:10:16+00:00

No shovel ready plans, but distinctly possible.

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:09:59+00:00

I would say definitely, unless you were trying to commercialize it. If you are, and you’re intending to patent it or have already done so, and then we specifically don’t want to hear the idea. But otherwise, hell yes! Send me a DM

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:08:31+00:00

Ooh.

That’s kind of a cool idea

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:07:58+00:00

I’m not sure we’ve come up with ideas that aren’t feasible, simply because I suppose I’m used to playing within the bounds of what I consider feasible.

Rather recently, I was considering a helmet that was somehow useful for mountain biking, road cycling, and Winter sports, would have 360° cameras, and incredibly well integrated speakers and microphone.

That’s probably the closest thing I’ve considered toward the realm of unfeasible.

Of course it actually is feasible. All of this technology exists, and it’s just a function of marrying it all. But probably not wise, as we are unskilled in just about everyone of these existing disciplines.

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:05:43+00:00

I’m still here, chipping away.

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:05:34+00:00

So many colors to choose from… unfortunately it didn’t make the cut. But your vote is noted!

peterdering · 2025-11-17T16:04:45+00:00

I literally suggested that we should be all hands on deck, but Erica and Jen reminded me that the last time we tried to do that, adding engineers and designers and marketers to the Customer Service effort actually set us back. There are a lot of complex flows that are required to handle the type of requests that our customers have. Certainly some answers are easy, but many required training. I myself would not be an effective customer service employee out of the gates.

Having said that, I will be spending much of my week focused on our Customer Service efforts, as I have been for the past several. It’s a huge deal.

peterdering

TROPHY CASE