In a world saturated with fleeting trends and disposable products, what does it take to design something truly meaningful and lasting? We explore this question with Todd Bracher, an award-winning industrial designer and the founder of BetterLab. With a portfolio that includes partnerships with iconic brands like Herman Miller and Issey Miyake, Todd has been honored twice as the International Designer of the Year. In this conversation, he delves into the powerful intersection of design, science, and technology, revealing how this synergy drives innovation. Todd shares his philosophy on human-centered design, the critical importance of sustainability, and his journey building a successful design firm. He also gives us a look inside BetterLab, where his team is creating game-changing products, from UVC light sanitizers to glasses that can reverse childhood myopia. This is a deep dive into the mind of a designer who is shaping a more responsible and thoughtful future.
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Nataraj: We haven’t had many industrial designers on the podcast. We usually talk about growing companies and designing technology products, so I think it would be interesting to get a more design-centric perspective on bringing products to market. To start, could you give a quick background about your entry into design and your career so far?
Todd Bracher: I’m not surprised that designers aren’t usually spoken with regarding business or startups, because designers often aren’t part of that process, strangely enough. That’s a source of my frustration. What brought me into design was applying to art school in the 1990s. I applied to Pratt Institute in New York, and to get in, you had to do a visual exam. The topic was to design a breathing device for a hypothetical future where we couldn’t survive in the open because of pollution. As I was drawing it, I started thinking through the design process: does it work? If you’re wearing it all the time, it has to look good, be comfortable, and work for men and women at work or at parties. When I submitted the drawing, they asked what it was because it wasn’t illustration; I had created a solution. They said, ‘Well, that’s called industrial design, but that’s not what you’re applying for.’ That’s the moment I switched to industrial design.
Nataraj: Were you always good at drawing? What made you gravitate towards design?
Todd Bracher: Drawing has always been a part of my life. It’s the lowest barrier to entry for seeing your ideas. When my brother and I were kids, we used to build little plastic model planes. He always said he wanted to be a pilot, and I was always in love with the form of the plane—how it’s very purpose-built, but beautiful. We had two different points of view on the same subject. Interestingly enough, he became a pilot, and I became a designer. It shows two ways to look at the same thing very differently and have very different experiences.
Nataraj: To crystallize the idea of industrial design, can you talk about a couple of examples of projects you’ve worked on and brought to market?
Todd Bracher: By definition, industrial design means really understanding how to manufacture at scale. You see a lot of design objects, but that doesn’t mean they’re industrially designed. Someone might make five chairs in their garage, and that’s design for sure, maybe a version of art or craft, but industrial design is about things that are repeatable and manufacturable at scale. My expertise is in understanding manufacturing, materials, processes, and the whole orchestration around supply chain and engineering. It’s really A to Z. I see myself as the representative of the market or the end user, and at the same time, the representative of the business manufacturing it. I’m the translator between the two. The products I work on can range from furniture to beauty products—I do fragrance bottles for Issey Miyake—to glasses or even a water dispensing machine. There’s a whole host of things, which is what’s cool about industrial design.
Nataraj: I want to shift to your perspective on technology products. What are some tech products you admire that have a strong design element, constructed in a way that you as a designer appreciate? And please, no Apple products—that’s the go-to answer for all designers.
Todd Bracher: And rightfully so, to be honest. Apple is incredible. What’s most interesting to me is when I see design in the world that leverages a certain aspect of science. I recall seeing things like color blindness correction. One example is a project we worked on with a gentleman who had invented a device that distributes a specific spectrum of UVC light. He developed it for NASA and the space station. I was part of the team that helped deploy it into architecture. What’s so incredible is that we weren’t just making a lamp. This UVC light is a germicidal light that deactivates pathogens—bacterial, viral—on surfaces or in the air, while being safe for humans in the environment. This gentleman figured out the science, engineered the light engine, and created a device we can afford. The designer’s job is to package it and deliver it to the market. These types of solutions are fascinating to me.
Nataraj: In the world of industrial design, what trends are you noticing? What’s in, what’s out, and what might an average person not know about?
Todd Bracher: The trends I see in design tend to be unfortunate in my opinion. They’re not going in the direction I would like, as they’re often very cosmetic. However, one trend that’s quite important is sustainability. You will see designers using less material and reaching for materials that are recyclable or come from recycled sources, like ocean-bound plastic. Various companies are collecting this material from waterways and reprocessing it for designers. This is a really wonderful trend. So on one hand, we have this incredibly responsible trend happening that most people don’t see. On the other hand, we still have the old trend of making consumable products, which has been disappointing. I think we’re in a transition point as an industry.
Nataraj: What’s disappointing about the consumable products?
Todd Bracher: I think they’re made a bit irresponsibly, without considering circularity or sustainability. A colleague and I once looked at a 30-story apartment building in New York City and wondered how many hammers were inside. If there are 100 apartments, there are probably 90 hammers. Why would there be even 50? Shouldn’t there just be two hammers in the building that people can share? This communal mentality could solve some of these problems. Instead, everyone is consuming things they don’t really need. It’s funny that as someone who creates products, I’m sort of anti-consumerism in that way.
Nataraj: What’s your take on Ikea? It’s mass-market, attainable, and brings designs that might otherwise be inaccessible to a wider audience, similar to how Zara operates in fashion.
Todd Bracher: It’s funny because they copied one of my lamps, and they did a terrible job at it. It’s not a well-executed version. However, I had a friendly argument with a friend about the drug industry—you can get a prescription for $80 a pill or the generic for $1. I think having a generic option is fantastic. I see IKEA in a similar light. I welcome that they copied my design. If someone enjoys it and can’t afford or access the original, that’s fine. I don’t know enough about their sustainability practices given their huge volume, and I imagine there’s a lot of waste because their products are so accessible that people tend to throw them away quickly. But as a business, I think they make pretty good design very accessible, and that’s a good thing. Design shouldn’t be expensive.
Nataraj: What are some brands, in furniture or fashion, that you admire as a designer?
Todd Bracher: One brand in particular is a Swiss brand called VITSOE. They make a shelving system designed by Dieter Rams around the 1950s. He’s often considered the founding father of Apple’s design DNA. It’s a very simple extruded aluminum rail you screw on the wall with a simple folded metal shelf. What I love is that these products look incredible nearly 70 years later. They function perfectly and last forever. They’re beautiful. That’s what I strive for in my work—creating something that stands the test of time in the truest sense.
Nataraj: Is that a big aspect of well-designed products—longevity? And does that contribute to their cost?
Todd Bracher: Yes, at least that’s how I like to live my life. I have a few things I really need and like, and they last forever. I don’t have to replace them every few years, which feels irresponsible. I go to these huge furniture fairs in Milan, and it’s an enormous amount of new stuff coming out every year. The question of where it all goes at the end of its life is a big one, and our industry doesn’t handle that very well.
Nataraj: You run BetterLab. Tell me about the business of running a design firm and the types of products you’re building.
Todd Bracher: I have two businesses. One is Bracher, my design consultancy, which is inbound—I work with clients. The other is Betterlab, which is my outbound venture platform. I started Betterlab because after serving clients for two decades, I wanted to do what I actually want to do. With client work, I don’t own it and don’t get to make 100% of the decisions. With BetterLab, it’s different. We have three ways of engaging. First, we do a diagnosis. Like going to a doctor, we first understand what a company needs rather than just taking a design brief. We provide a recommendation for treatment. The next phase is opportunity discovery, where we figure out what we’re trying to solve and if it aligns with business goals and market needs. The final phase is execution—the design portion—and then the rollout and marketing support.
Nataraj: What are some of the products that came out of BetterLab?
Todd Bracher: I’m quite in love with science, physics, and optics. I helped build a lighting business for 3M, and it was a realization that design and science fit beautifully together. BetterLab spun from this thinking. I had a beer with a scientist friend and asked him about his fears for the world. He mentioned myopia. Myopia is when the human eye doesn’t fully develop through childhood. He was one of the guys credited with inventing the commercialized LED, and he explained that modern LEDs are value-engineered to only emit the visible spectrum of light, ignoring the rest that the human eye thrives on. Now, kids spend more time indoors with LED lighting and screens, so they aren’t exposed to the full spectrum of light. The World Health Organization has identified myopia as the largest threat to eye health in the last hundred years. So, we developed a pair of glasses. In the frame, we attach a glow-in-the-dark material. When the child steps outside or the glasses are near a light source, they passively charge—no electronics. This material delivers the healthy spectrum of light to the eye. It also actually reverses myopia, unlike traditional treatments.
Nataraj: I think you’re also working on another sustainability project using light. Can you tell me about that?
Todd Bracher: Yes, back to the UVC light. Around 2019, I was helping put UVC light in architecture to mitigate the spread of COVID by sterilizing environments. But I realized a vaccine was coming, the technology was expensive, and people didn’t understand it. Meanwhile, I saw my young kids constantly using gel hand sanitizer and I wondered about the chemicals they were putting on their hands every day. On one hand, I had this chemical problem, and on the other, a technology that uses light to stop pathogens. I thought, what if we merge the two? So we developed Lightwash, a hand device using UVC technology. You put your hands under it, and within three to four seconds, they are sterilized. Light gets into all the crevices of the hands where liquid sanitizer doesn’t. Later, I learned that gel sanitizers are responsible for 2% of the global carbon footprint due to transport, storage, and maintenance. Our solution displaces that completely, which makes me incredibly happy.
Nataraj: You also advised startups at Antler, a pre-seed firm. What was that experience like?
Todd Bracher: My role there was interesting because they don’t make physical products, which is my expertise. I was a design advisor, asking questions from a design lens that they might not have considered. My role was to represent the end users. For financial or legal software, for instance, I’d ask, ‘Have you considered this? Does this experience feel trustworthy when you’re dealing with legal documents?’ I brought the soft side to their hard business, focusing on what really resonates with people.
Nataraj: Are there any day-to-day products you use because their design and utility are so good?
Todd Bracher: The first one that comes to mind is Leica cameras. They make what’s called the Leica M. The design has been roughly unchanged since it was first introduced, maybe in the 1930s. It’s an all-manual camera—no autofocus, no video. What it does is provide a real connection with capturing an image. It’s like the difference between driving a 1960s air-cooled Porsche and a modern Honda Accord. The Accord is great, but it doesn’t have the spirit, the feel of the machine and the connection to the road. The Leica is like that. It’s an inferior camera in some ways, but the experience is so superior that it makes you deliver your best work.
Nataraj: What’s your take on modern design aesthetics, like the trend where many luxury brands have adopted very similar, minimalist iconography?
Todd Bracher: I think one or two brands spearheaded it with success, and others followed quickly. I welcome it. I think design is late in this country. Apple helped unlock some of that, but the rest of the world, like Japan and Scandinavia, is light years ahead of the U.S. in areas like furniture design. I think globalization is helping improve design here. While it can get a little sanitized or washed out, I think it’s for the better. When you create simpler things, you have nowhere to hide. You’re delivering things that are more honest, which fits the contemporary culture we need, rather than hiding behind flashy noise.
Nataraj: What’s your take on digital design? Is the tech world doing it well?
Todd Bracher: I think it’s gotten better. I do fault Apple for some of their earlier choices, like the digital leather notebook with stitches. In my opinion, you should embrace the technology and its material rather than creating an image of a yesteryear material. But I do think digital design today has gotten quite good, even a bit experimental, which I welcome. I’m seeing more personality. The new codebases allow for more adventurous things. Designs are becoming less static, more engaging and interactive in a beneficial way. You can customize and adapt things much more, and I’m happy for that.
Nataraj: Anytime a designer talks, Japan is always mentioned. What is it about Japan that is so interesting in terms of design?
Todd Bracher: That’s a very big conversation. I have my own take. My partner is Japanese, so we have a deep appreciation for this. There’s a really deep connection to the experience of something and being truly present in what you’re doing. To me, that’s the anchor of what makes their design so good. In the Western world, we’re more interested in the cosmetics—is it the right shininess? In Japan, I feel they ask, ‘Are we really meeting the soul of what this thing needs to do?’ Take a traditional tea ceremony: the materials, the smells, the lighting—everything is considered for very specific reasons. It’s a true attention to the deepest meaning of what you’re doing.
Nataraj: We’re almost at the end. What are you consuming right now, be it a book, podcast, or show, that you’re inspired by?
Todd Bracher: I’ve been watching Lex Fridman’s podcast since he started. I enjoy his long-form interviews, usually on subjects I know nothing about, like a recent one with a former Russian spy. He also covers machine learning and other topics. He keeps it very neutral and is just there to share information. I’m also that weird guy who loves watching old MIT physics lectures on YouTube. I’m not a physicist, but after years of watching them, I feel like I have been trained. It’s fascinating how much you can learn, and it’s my way of switching my brain off.
Nataraj: Who are your mentors?
Todd Bracher: I don’t necessarily have a mentor, but one personality that keeps cropping up, strangely, is Charles Darwin. His thesis on the finches on the Galapagos—how different species had different shaped beaks based on what they were eating—really helped formulate my philosophy for design, which is designing in context. I’m making the solution most appropriate for its situation. I’m not imposing my opinion. The finch’s beak doesn’t have a random shape; it’s designed for function, but it’s still beautiful and logical. It’s absolutely designed for purpose. So I would say Darwin is my mentor.
Nataraj: What do you know now about being an industrial designer that you wished you knew when you were starting out?
Todd Bracher: The business side of design. For some reason, designers are often inserted at the end of a process to ‘make it look better.’ When I get things like this, I often ask, ‘Why are we making it? Did you talk to your market?’ You quickly find holes in the system. As a young designer, I wish I knew that we should be inserted at the beginning of the process to help identify the full context. That way, when the design arrives, we can deal with it relative to that context and not in isolation.
Nataraj: Todd, thanks for coming on the show. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I’m looking forward to seeing what BetterLab creates next.
Todd Bracher: Thank you, I really appreciate this. Thanks so much.
Todd Bracher’s insights offer a powerful reminder that great design goes beyond aesthetics; it solves real-world problems with intentionality and responsibility. His work at the crossroads of science and design highlights a future where products are not only beautiful and functional but also sustainable and deeply human-centered.
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