How a fitness company and a two-person studio made caffeine into something you could hold in your hand.
In 2013, Jawbone was one of the most interesting hardware companies around — a wristband, a beautiful app, and a quiet ambition to understand how the small choices of a day add up to how you feel. Somewhere in their internal hack days was an idea about caffeine. Product Club — the studio Matt Biddulph and I ran together — was brought in to help make it real.
The brief was open, which is the best and most dangerous kind. Everyone already half-knew that coffee, drunk too late, costs you sleep. The interesting question wasn't whether that was true — it was whether you could make a person feel it, day to day, without lecturing them.
The centrepiece was a physics toy: a flask, filled with dots that sloshed and settled as you moved your phone. Log a flat white and a few more poured in; watch them fade through the afternoon as your body cleared them.
One of the best small additions came almost by accident: a pile of genuinely interesting facts about caffeine metabolism — women generally process caffeine faster than men, and the contraceptive pill can slow that metabolism by up to a third. "Did You Know" became a small rotating daily fact, built with real help from Jawbone's data team.
It shipped, it charmed people, and it's still one of the projects I'm fondest of. The full story is on Medium →