Michal Marek Whenever people talk about Apple and the iconic design of its products, people think of Jony Ivo, the company's in-house designer. Ive is truly a celebrity, the face of the company, and a man with considerable influence on its direction. However, it is clear that one person cannot do all of Apple's design work, and the success of Apple products is far from being owed to this individual alone.
Ive is a member of a capable team, in the core of which we also find a new man - Mark Newson. Who is he, how did he get to Cupertino and what is his position in the company?
Apple officially hired Newson last September, that is, at the time when the company presented the new iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. In reality, however, Newson had already worked with the company on watches. Moreover, it was far from the first time that Newson met Jony Ive at work. “It started long before the Apple Watch,” Newson says of his watchmaking history with Jony Ive.
The 2-year-old man from Sydney, Australia, worked with Ive three years ago to design a special edition Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox watch for an auction organized to raise funds for the RED charity initiative. It was founded by the singer Bono from the Irish band UXNUMX, in order to fight AIDS. At that time, it was Ivo's first experience with designing watches. However, Newson already had many of them at that time.
In the 90s, Newson founded the company Ikepod, which produced several thousand watches. And it is with this brand that we can see many similarities in the new Apple Watch. In the attached image above is the Ikepod Solaris watch, on the right is the Watch from Apple, whose Milanese Loop band is strikingly similar.
According to information provided by Marc Newson to the newspaper London Evening Standard, the Australian does not hold any nameable position within the company's management in Cupertino. In short, his mission is "work on special projects". Newson doesn't work full-time for Apple, but he devotes about 60 percent of his time to it. He never worked with Steve Jobs, but he met him.
In terms of his design career, Newson has amassed a number of successes. He even holds a respectable record. The Lockheed Lounge chair designed by him is the most expensive design sold by a living designer. Singer Madonna also owns one of the several chairs he designed. Newson has a real reputation in his profession and could work for almost anyone. So why did he choose Apple, moving halfway around the world from his two children and his wife, who lives in London, where Newson moved twenty years ago?
The key to this perhaps incomprehensible step is Newson's relationship with Jony Ive. The two men met in London twenty years ago and have never been completely separated professionally or personally since. They share a design philosophy, and most of today's consumer goods are equally a thorn in the side of both. So they try to fight against established design conventions and create their own radically different products. “We're very easy to work with,” admits Newson.
Forty-eight-year-old Jony Ive removed the ugly box-shaped computers from our desks and eradicated the black plastic phones from our pockets, replacing them with sleek, simple and intuitive devices. Newson's characteristic bold colors and sensual curves, on the other hand, can be seen in Nike shoes, Cappellini furniture and on the planes of the Australian airline Qantas.
But it is quite unusual for Newson to work on something that is intended for the masses. Just fifteen of the aforementioned Lockheed Lounge chairs were made for the idea. At the same time, more than a million Apple Watches have already been ordered. At Apple, however, they are striving to transform the company from a purely technological company into one that sells luxury goods for the richest.
The gold Apple Watch for half a million crowns is supposed to be just the first step, and Apple has taken a really responsible approach to its sale. The most expensive Apple Watch is sold in the classic "luxury" way, separately from other products of the company. In addition, their sale is overseen by such people as Paul Deneve, the former executive director of the Saint Laurent fashion house.
Marc Newson appears to be the man who is exactly what Apple needs to transform itself into a company relevant both in the technology industry and in the luxury goods segment. Newson has experience with technology, which can be evidenced by his past at the already mentioned watch company Ikepod. Of course, his collaboration with Ivo na is also worth mentioning Leica camera, which was designed also for the RED initiative auction.
At the same time, Newson is a trained silversmith and a trained jeweler who has worked for brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Azzedine Alaïa and Dom Pérignon.
So Mark Newson is a kind of "fashionable" man who clearly has his place in the current Apple. Let's not expect Newson to design iPhones and iPads in the future. But he certainly has an important role in the team working on the Apple Watch, and not only there. This man is said to be looking for intersections between fashion and technology and claims that technology can bring amazing things to fashion.
Like Jony Ive, Marc Newson is also a big car lover, which is a topic that has been talked about a lot in relation to Apple lately. "There's definitely a tremendous opportunity to be much more intelligent in this area," Newson believes, without going into details.
As already mentioned, Newson is also active outside of Apple. Right now, his first store for the giant German publisher Taschen is opening in Milan. In it, Newson designed a unique modular storage system for storing books. Newson has been working with the founder of this publishing house, Benedikt Taschen, for many years, which resulted in Newson's own monograph Marc Newson: Works.
Marc Newson is also currently spending a certain amount of time dealing with matters related to the construction of a new villa on the Greek island of Ithaca, where his family spends summers and consumes olive oil from its own production.
