Applying Raymond Loewy’s MAYA Principle to Modern Markets

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Bill Lenehan discussed Applying Raymond Loewy’s MAYA Principle to Modern Markets. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Jake: Wow. Great job teasing that, TC. What a legend.

Tobias: Becoming almost a professional podcaster at this point.

Jake: Yeah, the 3,000th time is the charm. All right, start this one off with shoutout to my dear friend Dan Sheehan for serving me these veggies on a silver platter. And I’ll just reheat them and try to serve them to you, pass them off as my own. So today, we’re blending the worlds of design, innovation, and investment through a principle called MAYA. No, not MAGA. It’s MAYA, M-A-Y-A, which stands for most advanced yet acceptable. And this idea came from a true legend, this French American named Raymond Loewy. And he’s often called the father of industrial design. And his work really didn’t just shape modern aesthetics, it influenced how products, brands, even space stations were conceptualized.

So, let’s start with a little background on Loewy. He was born in 1893 in Paris and served as a captain in the French Army during World War I. And he earned the Croix de Guerre after sustaining injuries. And in his recovery, in 1919, post recovery, he left for the US, and he immigrated to New York. He had this huge passion for design, and he’s a real genius that emerged as companies were eager to make their products not just functional, but also visually appealing. And he got his start as a window dresser for department stores, including Macy’s, which I thought would be a fun tie-in with Bill coming on the show today.

Loewy’s genius lay in marrying form with function and a skill that made him a go-to designer. He designed the logos for Shell, Exxon, TWA, Nabisco, BP, Quaker, the US Postal Service. He designed Coca Cola vending machines and bottle designs, Lucky Strike packaging, several Pennsylvania railroad locomotives, Studebaker’s Starlight series of cars, which are still considered some of the most beautiful, Sears Cold Spot refrigerators, even how Air Force One would be kitted out, which is called a livery. And from 1967 to 1973, helped NASA design the Skylab Space Station. So, his work really shaped like the everyday experience of the 20th century American. In fact, he is quoted as saying, “I can claim to have made the daily life of the 20th century more beautiful.”

And his design philosophy really boiled down to this golden rule that he called MAYA, which is again, most advanced, yet acceptable. And it captures this paradox. People crave novelty, but they resist change that feels too alien to them. So, he understood that there’s this fine line that you have to walk between familiarity and innovation. If you get too far ahead of your audience, they might reject you. And if you hew too close to the past, they get bored and they’re not interested. Think about the iPhone. It wasn’t the first smartphone. Touchscreens and apps were cutting edge at the time. Yet, it was familiar enough to gain quick acceptance.

Now, let’s see if we can torture some MAYA into an investment context here. First, obviously, it might help you just understand the success of a consumer product potentially as you’re evaluating a business. Let’s take Tesla, for instance. Their EVs were futuristic, but yet familiar enough. They didn’t look like those weird go-karts of previous EV vintages. They were actual cars, but just better in a lot of ways, like the torque especially–

Tobias: Arguably simpler too.

Jake: Yeah, simpler, right. Just a screen to turn the windshield wipers on.

Tobias: And to open the glove compartment. That’s like three levels down in the menu.

Jake: All right. Anyway, Tesla balanced MAYA beautifully. And on the flip side, let’s think about like Google Glass, for instance. Like, marvel of technology, amazing stuff packed into it, but it didn’t strike this balance. Like, people found it too futuristic, too invasive and which led to then like ridicule and non-adoption.

So, I think we can apply MAYA to the types of companies that we invest in. There can be these adjacent possibilities to your circle of competence. So maybe, Bill, this is you moving from restaurants into adding tire shops because it’s just that little bit of outside of the circle. You get to know an industry, it happens touch another industry and gives you a little bit of foothold to start learning about it, and then you can expand your circle from there. So, it’s kind of the most advanced for you. Yet, it’s acceptable to make this manageable leap in what you’re understanding.

I think it also can steer you wrong in some cases if you aren’t careful. So, when you are pattern matching to something that has done exceptionally well, you might make the mistake of thinking that you found the next big thing. And Uber for ABC or Airbnb for XYZ like that was a very common refrain in the venture world for the last decade. I’m not sure any of those businesses will eventually make it. I don’t know. And then, I’ve actually often wondered if there will be more money lost chasing the next Amazon than there was ever made finding the original Amazon. I think that’s a pretty common thing in markets. So, you have to be a little bit careful in handling MAYA.

But let’s close out this veggie segment with my favorite Loewy quote, which is, “The most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph.” There’s some industrial design from one of the original in the 20th century.

Tobias: Who’s the modern version? Jony Ives or something like that?

Jake: Yeah, probably. I mean, he’s definitely got the aesthetic right.

Tobias: Clean lines. White clean lines.

Jake: But familiarity to it enough where it’s not jarring.

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