Teenage Engineering founder says the company will stop making synthesizers

Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of the Swedish company Teenage Engineering, has told his team that the firm will no longer make synthesizers, according to the German magazine Groove. The announcement came during a restructuring, and it includes the OP-1, the 2011 pocket synthesizer that made the Stockholm company famous and remains one of the most sought-after instruments on the used-gear marketplace Reverb.

Kouthoofd recalls that everyone asked “what are you talking about?” His conclusion, he says, is that products are not really the business for Teenage Engineering, and that the company can be much more.

Founded in 2005, Teenage Engineering employs around 100 people and has annual revenue of about 46 million dollars. Its customers range from hobbyists to Travis Scott, Sabrina Carpenter and electronic musician Richard Devine. The catalogue is unusual: a portable vinyl cutter, a tape dispenser, a 2,000-dollar choir of eight wooden dolls and a groovebox loaded with medieval samples. Kouthoofd releases ideas that do not look sensible or profitable to see what happens, makes decisions alone and personally picks which of a hundred prototypes reach the market.

He describes the OP-1 as a protest against making music on a laptop, and says most synth buyers do not use their machines to produce music: for them it is therapy, entertainment or a hobby. He did not say what will replace the synthesizers. The company's lab is working on projects due in five to ten years, and Kouthoofd believes one of them will change life online.