WEEKEND WARRIOR
A few years ago my grandfather went shopping for a new wristwatch. Everybody knew about it soon enough. “What’s the deal with watches nowadays?” he yelled, one afternoon, putting down his tea so he could wave his hands more freely. “What are these know-it-all, show-off watchmakers trying to achieve? I don’t need my watch to tell me how far I’ve walked, to call my kids or to show me emails. I just need it to tell me the time.”
My old man’s man hit upon a fundamental design principle that day. To properly serve customers, a product needs to have clarity of purpose. To that end, it needs to keep things simple. Too many features and all of a sudden you have an unruly Frankenstein’s monster.
While testing out a Jayco J-Pod Outback in the Victorian High Country recently, I was reminded of this memory. This camper certainly has a clear purpose — to enable couples on a budget to venture out through the rough stuff to beautiful destinations. And its simple design serves this purpose to a tee. My grandfather would’ve liked it.
“This camper
