Every company loves to tell their success stories. We'd rather tell you about the times we drove straight into a ditch. Partly because honesty is our thing. Partly because these stories are way funnier.
Valco's product development isn't some silky smooth highway from idea to finished product. It's more like a gravel road where you occasionally veer into a ditch, reverse back out, and try the next junction. A 14-person company can't afford big mistakes, but we've made up for it with plenty of small ones.
Headphones that sounded good – too literally
One of Jasse's first sound profile experiments for the VMK series was a version he described as "perfect". The only problem was that Jasse listens to the kind of music in his spare time that a normal person would describe as "noise". The first test listeners reported that the headphones sounded like someone was shoving a subwoofer into your ear canal.
Jasse went back to the drawing board. These days his ears are insured, but nobody has agreed to insure his music taste.
A colour that didn't exist
At some point we decided we needed an "army green" colour option. We placed the order with the factory. What we got back looked more like the contents of a tin of pea soup than anything remotely military. Henri said it was "distinctive". Everyone else said it was ugly.
It was ugly. The colour was never released. Having learned from that, we now have Depression Blue and Fuckshia – colours where the name at least tells you what you're getting.
A speaker that survived water but not the postal service
During the Nordell speaker development phase, we tested water resistance thoroughly. We dunked the prototype in a bucket, a lake, and a shower. All good. Then we sent the first batch to customers via the postal service. Three speakers arrived in such a state that waterproofing tests were irrelevant – they were already flat.
Packaging design was significantly improved after that. We haven't managed to improve the postal service's handling.
A feature nobody asked for
Once we added a feature to a prototype that played an audio alert for the battery level every ten percent. Brilliant idea on paper. In practice, the headphones beeped so often that one tester compared the experience to a smoke alarm with a dying battery. The feature was removed the same day.
What we learned from all this
Failures are cheaper than pretending. We try, we cock up, and we fix it. In that order. Big companies spend millions on focus groups and consultants to avoid mistakes. We make the mistakes ourselves and save the money for what matters – like building the Death Star and Henri's dream of trading his Alfa Romeo for a car that actually works.
Every VMK25.2, NL25, and Nordell you buy has been through dozens of terrible versions before it ended up in your hands. That's our way of saying we care. Or at least that we're stubborn.
If you want to support our next mistake – and the success that follows it – our shop is at valco.fi. 0.000001% of every purchase goes towards the Death Star.
