If the current parenting vibe is a collective scream into the void about screen time, Tin Can is the soothing, pastel-hued weighted blanket. It’s a landline phone for kids that looks like it was plucked straight from a 1992 Sears catalog, complete with a curly cord that practically begs to be twirled around a finger while you gossip. It’s intentionally lo-fi: no apps, cameras, or doom-scrolling. Instead, it’s a stationary box that forces your child to sit in one spot and actually practice the lost art of the verbal "hello".

Curious observation: what makes this stick isn’t just the "dring-dring" nostalgia, but the way it’s spreading through parent "pods" like a secret society. It’s a rare moment where word-of-mouth carries way more weight than an Instagram ad; you’re not just buying a piece of hardware, you’re buying into a local pact to keep the smartphone at bay for another year. There’s also a certain status in the "Can 2 Can" network. It’s turning the most old-school technology we have into a premium, closed-loop social network where the only barrier to entry is knowing your friend's five-digit number and having enough slack in the cord to reach the beanbag chair.

For years, the prevailing tech aesthetic has been "mysterious black slab": devices designed to look like seamless, magic objects that arrived fully formed from the future. But a new wave of hardware is finally putting its guts on display again. Leading the charge is Nothing, which recently hit a billion dollars in sales by leaning into a design language that treats circuit boards like art. From the glowing, skeletal interior of their phones to the latest see-through Beats Studio Buds+, gadgets are ditching the "sleek" mystery in favor of a look that says: look at all the cool stuff I’m actually doing.

Curious observation: this isn’t just a nostalgia trip for anyone who misses their clear Game Boy Color. It's about making the invisible hand visible. In a world of generative AI and automated "everything," there is a growing desire to see the fingerprints of the people who actually built the things we love. It’s a shift from "magic" to "craft." For brands, the takeaway is that polish can sometimes feel cold and untrustworthy; showing the raw, complex reality of your work creates a level of intimacy and respect that a seamless facade just can't match.

The ✨ sparkles ✨ emoji is officially the hardest-working icon in tech. What started in 1997 as a "visual affix" in Japanese manga to show a twinkle in a character’s eye has been repurposed as the universal shorthand for "AI lives here". Since 2023, the use of the sparkle in Google’s ecosystem alone has jumped by as much as 37% every single quarter. It’s become so ubiquitous that it’s less of an emoji and more of a "magic" button, slapped onto everything from photo-editing tools to spreadsheet generators to signal that something invisible and clever is happening under the hood.

Curious observation: the sparkle’s ascent is what I would describe as “iconic laziness”. Tech companies didn't choose it because it was technically accurate, they chose it because it’s a safe metaphor for magic that avoids the cold, clinical baggage of robots or CPUs. But as Google’s own researchers have found, this ubiquity is a double-edged sword: while users recognize it as "the AI star," they often have no clue what the icon actually does or whether they’re looking at a generative LLM or just a basic 2016-era filter. We’ve reached "sparkle fatigue," and the lesson for marketers is clear: when everyone uses the same visual shorthand to represent "magic," the magic starts to feel like a commodity.

We’ve been working with Xometry to help their story catch up to the company they’ve actually become, shifting the focus from the parts they make to what those parts actually unlock for their customers. I posted a short video breaking down the strategy behind the shift and how to find the deeper narrative sitting just under the spec sheet.