"Isn't wabi-sabi something you eat?"

It's a fair guess. Wasabi clears your sinuses. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic that clears something else: the assumption that a product looks its best on the day it leaves the factory.

For anyone developing a product, it swaps the usual question, "how will it look in the launch photos?", for a more interesting one: how will it look and feel after years of use? That doesn't mean every scratch is beautiful. It means choosing which marks you'll welcome, and designing for them.

Where the Idea Comes From

Wabi (subdued, austere beauty) and sabi (the character of age) have roots in Japanese poetry and later became tied to the tea ceremony. Leonard Koren says his 1994 book, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, introduced the term to the non-Japanese world.

Koren later wrote that his book left out how the two words came to be paired, which fed misconceptions about wabi-sabi's history. So treat the following as a handy shorthand for product people, not a textbook definition: wabi is restraint built in from the start, and sabi is character earned through use. The shorthand also explains why a pre-distressed finish fails: it fakes sabi and runs against wabi's restraint. (Pre-distressed jeans have the same problem: nobody earned those holes.)

Three Ideas Worth Borrowing

Materials age differently. In a Vogue column, designer Alex Eagle lists vegetable-tanned leather and unlacquered brass among materials that change visibly with age. Others simply get shabby. One way to sort the difference: patina is change owners welcome, wear is change they can tolerate or maintain, and degradation is loss of performance or change they would reject. Conservation research asks a similar question. A 2026 peer-reviewed study of metal heritage objects argues that the test is not merely whether a surface change looks appealing, but whether it preserves the material's stability, jeopardizes the object's structure or adds to its heritage value. It also argues that harmless luster from long use may count as patina. No material deserves a blanket promise to "age beautifully". The only real test is time and use. 

Imperfection works best when it's decided. A knot in the wood or a firing mark on a bowl can be the best part of an object. Variation is much easier to love when it was agreed and explained before production starts than when it shows up as the first complaint.

Repair can be part of the story. Kintsugi mends broken ceramics with lacquer, often decorated with powdered gold, so the break becomes part of the object's history instead of something to hide. In the tea tradition behind wabi, cracked utensils that had been well repaired could be valued above intact ones. Product teams can borrow the logic by designing so that repair is possible, and sometimes visible, rather than a last resort. In electronics, a lovely patina on the casing matters little if the battery can't be replaced.

Three Examples Through a Wabi-Sabi Lens

Of the three accounts below, only Nike's uses the term itself. For Noguchi and Fairphone, we're applying the wabi-sabi lens ourselves.

Nike Space Hippie. In Nike's own account of the shoe, released in summer 2020, designer Haley Toelle explains that Crater Foam, which in that account uses about 10 percent Nike Grind (rubber scrap from shoe manufacturing) as filler, kept coming out bubbly when a colleague tried earlier to make it more uniform. The Space Hippie team decided to roll with the look. Quality-control teams at partner factories usually treat flaws as red flags, so Toelle asked them to appreciate the "wabi-sabi nature" of the materials and not throw them out. Nike reports about 3.7 kg CO2e for the Space Hippie 04, against 12.5 kg for an industry-standard shoe in an MIT study, though it says the team fell short of its zero-carbon goal. This is imperfection from manufacturing rather than from aging, but the principle carries over.

• The character was accepted, tied to a clear purpose and explained to the people who could have discarded it, instead of being rejected as a defect.

Noguchi's Akari lamps. The Noguchi Museum says Isamu Noguchi sought the wrinkled character that washi takes on as it slowly degrades and as lamps are collapsed and reinstalled.

• Age and handling were treated as part of the lamp's character, not as flaws.

Fairphone. Fairphone says you can replace up to 12 spare parts on its Gen. 6 phone, including the battery, the display and the USB-C port.

• repair is treated as a design feature, which keeps the object in use long enough to age at all.

Where It Goes Wrong

Wabi-sabi is not a license for sloppiness or for loose claims. Four traps are worth naming.

1. Safety and function: Unsafe edges, unreliable controls and surfaces that are hard to clean are not aesthetic choices.
2. Honest description: Distressing can be a legitimate finish, but it should be described as a finish, not as evidence of use. A printed wood grain should never be sold as solid wood.
3. Footprint: An imperfect look is not, by itself, proof of a smaller footprint. Ask for measured data, as with any other environmental claim.
4. Context: The Japanese origin deserves an explanation, not a slot in a shopping category. The label is often stretched to cover almost anything rough, beige or slightly wonky.

Wabi-sabi is not the same as minimalism, either, though the confusion is understandable. Minimalism reduces a design to its essentials. Wabi-sabi is concerned with how an object ages and which imperfections it welcomes. Japandi, a Japanese–Scandinavian interior style that blends wabi-sabi with Scandinavian comfort, tends toward simplicity and calm, which helps blur the line. Even so, a minimal form is not automatically a wabi-sabi one. How a product ages depends on its materials, finishes and use, not on its silhouette.

Four Questions for Your Next Product Meeting

1. Which parts will look better after three years of use, and which will look worse?
2. Which differences between units are we happy with, and where is the line?
3. Is what we say about the material and finish honest, and will it still be true in three years?
4. If something wears out or breaks, can it be repaired or replaced?

Design Beyond Launch Day

Wabi-sabi in product design comes down to one useful question: will the way this object changes make people value it more, or less? Most products end up scratched, stained and worn. The interesting part is whether that wear reads as damage to hide or as history worth keeping. A knot can reveal the wood, a firing mark the process and a visible repair the care, provided the product keeps performing and its description stays honest. Unlike wasabi, wabi-sabi won't improve your sushi, but it might spark an idea for your next product.