- Tension: When a brand hands its identity to its customers, does it become more itself—or disappear entirely?
- Noise: Social-network hype that promises engagement while quietly renting the ground beneath the relationship.
- Direct Message: Co-creation is only as durable as the platform that hosts the conversation.
Read more about our approach → The Direct Message Methodology
You might still find one of those bright-rubber watch straps in a desk drawer, its color long since dulled.
In 2011, that silicone band felt alive: you could swap it out, vote on its next hue, even name the print that would land on the face. The company behind the promise—Modify Watches—described each customer as a “designer in residence.” Their laboratory wasn’t a studio in Oakland but a Facebook tab, running a fledgling app called Brainstorm that let fans pitch, vote, and argue in real time. A young brand had discovered a way to outsource not just feedback but meaning.
The co-creation ritual felt intimate: Aaron Schwartz, then “director of player personnel,” answered comments at dawn and again past midnight. The miniature focus groups poured out memories—basketball teams, wedding colors, military units—each craving a watch that mirrored a fragment of personal narrative.
Facebook’s infinite scroll turned product development into a public diary. Fans weren’t asked what to buy but who they were; Modify promised to etch that answer onto a 44-millimeter square of plastic.
Yet the candor masked a contradiction. To open the Brainstorm app, you first granted Facebook permission to skim your social graph. The same act that made you a co-creator also made you inventory. Likes were the currency; algorithms the exchange. In 2011 that bargain felt harmless, even democratic. By 2014, when Modify shifted to a Kickstarter campaign for fully custom faces, the cost of attention had already begun to climb.
Scroll forward.
The Brainstorm threads went quiet, drowned by autoplay video and Sponsored Posts. Modify fought the algorithm in the only way a small team could—handwritten notes in every shipment, live-streamed assembly lines, endless polls. But velocity favors scale, and scale favors platforms that own their pipes.
In January 2019, the brand accepted acquisition by Custom Ink — the startup that once bragged about runs “as small as one unit” now routes shoppers to bulk order screens that begin at twenty.
Aaron Schwartz occasionally resurfaces on LinkedIn with a grainy video of the San Francisco workshop—sharpies, jig saws, interns hunched over bins of watch faces—captioned “What a time it was.”
The comments read like a reunion. Nostalgia travels easily through feeds; finished products, less so.
Meanwhile the original domain, modifywatches.com, now loops to Custom Ink’s catalog of mood-ring pedometer watches—solid, serviceable, anonymous. The Facebook Page that once pulsed with iterative design tips last updated in 2018; Instagram’s bio simply reads “exclusively at Custom Ink.” The canvas of co-creation was never the product; it was the newsfeed. Once that canvas rewrote its rules, the dialogue died mid-sentence.
The Direct Message
The crowd can write your story—but only on paper that isn’t theirs to keep.
A watch is an object that measures something larger than itself: seconds, seasons, a life span. Modify’s rise and fade compress that arc into a parable. The brand believed that letting customers vote on colors would hard-wire loyalty. Instead it revealed how fragile a community can be when its meeting hall is leased hourly by an algorithm.
Marketers still preach “build with, not for.” It’s noble. It’s necessary. But it is also geography. Co-creation thrives where conversation persists—Slack, Discord, a subreddit, a dim basement where volunteers pack orders by hand. The moment dialogue migrates, the blueprint tears.
When you encounter the next platform promising frictionless feedback and limitless reach, remember the drawer with that fading silicone strap. The clasp still works. The face still ticks. What’s missing is the room where everybody once decided together what time it should display.
