Unveiled in 2003 by Siemens in a stalled mobile phone market, Xelibri’s main thrust to set itself apart from the clutter was to establish itself as a fashion item, a must-have accessory that allows you to make phone calls with style. Created to be distributed over new channels (upmarket department stores and fashion retailers that did not sell mobile phones before), this fashionably wearable devices family was supposed to grow every six months, with a two-collections-per-year schedule that tried to encourage consumers to update their phones regularly, but never got time to hook the audience and blossom on its own ambition.
Oddly, although the brand got nixed prematurely by its genitors – Siemens - roughly 18 months after its launch (after selling just 780,000 devices – less than 2% of Siemens’ total handset sales in 2003), Xelibri did quite an awful lot right, paving the way for an era of style-first phones and ushering in a return to basic devices, primarily concentrating on the simplest of features: voice and text.
Whether depicting a 2020 everyday life where dance is a crime and catwalking a possibility for the beer bellies in all of us, the audaciously quirky renditions of the future envisioned by Mother undoubtedly helped define this self-proclaimed future-jamming positioning by heavily relying on dreamlike visual effects, hypnotic music (Goldrapp’s Strict Machine being one of them) and surreal plots that made you wonder what the hell you just watched.
Xelibri – Face of The Future
(See the making of here)
