Speaking at SXSW Sydney, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan talked frankly the past and future of its most meme-worthy product.
“We’ve made the commitment to be launching a toaster called Project Breadwinner at some point in time and it is something very serious for us,” he said.
Originally teased by Razer as an April Fool’s joke in 2016 as a response to a long-running fan petition, Project Breadwinner has since graduated from a bizarre bet into a real product that Tan says the company is committed to shipping.
As Tan tells the story, it all began with an Australian who decided that “instead of building spaceships and rockets to mars and stuff like that…it would be best if Razer apply our design and engineering talents to building a toaster.”
At the time, Razer didn’t take the initiative too seriously. Still, the company prides itself on engaging with its community so Tan weighed in and put his stance on the record. He agreed that it was a funny idea but he needed to see evidence of an audience for a Razer toaster larger than one very vocal advocate.
“So he went out and started a petition and all of a sudden we saw a couple of thousand people turn up,” Tan said.
Some fans even claimed to pledge themselves to a hunger strike (swearing off toast, naturally) until the company would meet their demands.
Tan met them halfway with a bet. In some ways, that was his first mistake.
Rather than be deterred, Tan’s challenge only encouraged more fans to get involved. The petition quickly ballooned to more than 44,000 likes on Facebook. It had come a long way from one angry Australian. Still, Tan wasn’t too worried.
“That’s a bit of a way away [from a million]. Nothing that would get me really concerned,” he said. This overconfidence later led to his second mistake: doubling down.
“In a random moment, I said that if somebody gets a tattoo of a Razer toaster that counts as a hundred thousand votes,” he explained.
It didn’t take long for a dozen or so fans to take up this gauntlet. Fortunately, Tan had left himself one critical loophole.
While Tan didn’t have any firm details to share at SXSW Sydney about when Project Breadwinner would be ready to come out of the oven, he did talk up the resources the company was allocating towards it.
“True to form, we have put together a design and engineering team dedicated to thermals and design. By the way, this is serious business for us. Every time we design a product it’s serious business,” he said.
Unfortunately, the community responsible for making Project Breadwinner a priority sometimes takes things a little too seriously.
Tan said that he has ’toned down’ his willingness to needle and mess with the Razer community as a result of death threats that Project Breadwinner has inspired.
“It’s not funny. I mean when you think about it it’s kind of funny because they’re death threats about a toaster but it’s not funny because it’s directed at some of our engineering team,” he said.
For now, the company remains in stealth mode when it comes to the toaster.
“We want to make sure that if and when we launch Project Breadwinner it’s going to be the ultimate toaster on the planet but do be patient and we will get there,” he said.
“But chill out on the death threats,” he added.
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