When Neil Ferrier was in college he began to envision his future work. He created a make-believe company called N1 Industries and built a lounge chair out of a race car seat. Yet it was a different era then, and the notion that he could actually build and sell a product didn’t seem accessible at the time.
Ferrier earned a mechanical engineering degree and moved to California. He joined the advanced product development department at Oakley, and that’s where it all clicked for him. “I had this idea, turned it into a CAD model, and saw it come off of a 3D printer,” he says. “I realized I could make things real, and that thrill never left.”
Neil Ferrier
He thought he would be with the sports lifestyle brand for a few years at most, but ended up staying for 11 years. He realized that what he did day in and day out stopped being a hobby, and became a career he never wanted to leave. After the decade-plus with the brand, Ferrier founded Discommon, an industrial design firm with a roster of varied projects from consumer electronics to architecture.
Ferrier is always appreciative of well-crafted objects. He has an affinity for watches, because they are essentially his life’s work encapsulated in tiny objects. He owns a treasured collection of vintage TAG Heuer watches, including a rare 1960s Autavia that he modified to have a one-off titanium body. He is even the co-founder and CEO of Blok, a Swiss-made children’s watch brand.
As a father himself now, Ferrier is learning to balance his job and family life, and he’ll head out on the road to reset. “I have really had to focus on leaving work behind and showing up present at home,” he notes. “Driving helps. I often take a longer route home to shift through gears and listen to an engine do its thing.”
Today, Neil Ferrier joins us for Friday Five!
Photo: Shashi Reddy
1. Eagle E-Type
I have been fortunate enough to be around almost every one of my dream cars, often driving them at pace, but my friend’s Eagle E-type haunts me. It’s not my favorite looking vehicle, nor the most fun I’ve driven, but when it comes to sheer uncompromising execution, there’s not a detail on that car that isn’t jaw dropping. All handmade, all chasing perfection.
Photo: Eudald de Juana
2. The work of my friend Eudald de Juana
There are endless sculptors that I follow on Instagram, but rarely do I see work that captures effortless emotion like Eudald’s work. He leaves all his tool marks, which with a less gifted person could end up looking careless, but his feels to me like the purest sense of communicating emotion – “my hands are bringing this to life.”
Photo: Neil Ferrier
3. The art of wind
If I were religious I suppose this would be God’s Work, but owning a design firm, we have to work hard to stay fresh with creativity. It never ceases to amaze me the shapes you can see on a beach courtesy of nature shaping the sand.
Photo: Neil Ferrier
4. Softer Volumes
I have no idea how they created this book and how it was somehow globally art directed to feel like one person traveled and shot every location in the same light but there’s not a page I turn without an audible explanation of “Damn.”
5. Clarence “Kelly” Johnson and the A-12 / SR-71 aircraft
These were designed on drafting paper in the 1960s. That’s it. That simply blows my mind every time I consider their forms – have we really progressed in the last 50 years? The shape of that plane makes me question progress. The pictures are from some sculptures we made inspired by the shape.
Works by Neil Ferrier and Discommon:
The Flask 2.0
The first time I took a serious risk. I was consulting for The Macallan doing their nutty and creative projects. When the proposed flask design from Urwerk was too complicated for The Macallan to comfortably manufacture, I had one of those out of body experiences and announced that we’d do it. That was NOT our business model at the time and all of a sudden we were committed to making 500 flasks built of 167 components each. It was a serious uplevel in our future confidence.
Cost Of Victory
I mentioned Eudald’s work earlier. This was a story and a visual that I had in my head and had sketched. It was one of the first times Discommon was going to do something purely for me. I approached Eudald and he agreed to collaborate on it with me. The edition sold out immediately to our followers.
Wee Beastie
This is an old project now, but true to the mantra of being “Discommon,” I wanted to learn to ride a motorcycle, so clearly my brain decided that the best way to do that would be if I built a bike from scratch. I traded a 12 pack of beer and a pair of Oakley’s for a bike that hadn’t run since 1983. It was a full blueprint engine build and completely custom bike. I learnt to ride the first time the bike ran.
The Concorde
It has to be in this list because it’s simply absurd. Another one of those moments where I announced we could do it and then realized what I had said. 300 machined panels, 1500 pieces of custom hardware, the 8th floor of The Peninsula in London.
Iron Mando
Proud of this one because of the ripples it made. I saw some AI art of a blue porcelain Mandalorian helmet and thought “AI is cute, but I wonder if we could make something like that real?” So we did. We morphed Mandalorian and Iron Man helmets to reduce the risk of being sued!