Polaroid: the phone won the instant picture, and the slow print came back

On 26 November 1948 Polaroid put its first instant camera, the Land Camera Model 95, on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston, and the stock brought for the demonstration sold out the same day. For half a century Edwin Land’s company owned a simple promise: a photograph in your hand a minute after you pressed the button. Digital cameras and then phones delivered the same result faster and for free. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 in October 2001, the company that bought its name filed again in December 2008, and in 2008 Polaroid announced that it would stop making instant film.

At the closing of the film plant in Enschede, in the Netherlands, Florian Kaps, who ran an online shop for Polaroid film, met André Bosman, the manager in charge of shutting the factory down. With Marwan Saba they founded the Impossible Project, leased part of the plant and bought machinery. They could not buy the chemistry: the formulas and many of the raw materials no longer existed, so in 2010 they started selling film they had largely reinvented, slow to develop and unpredictable in colour. Investors from the Smołokowski family later took control, in 2017 the company acquired the Polaroid brand and renamed itself Polaroid Originals, and in March 2020 it went back to the plain Polaroid name.

A value that became the standard

The method has a law for what happened to Polaroid’s first life, the Principle of Transient Stability: the only way to make a value stable is to make it tangible, and a value that has become stable stops being valuable. Polaroid made speed tangible better than anyone. Then speed became the norm. Once a phone in every pocket produced an image in a second and shared it in two, the instant print had nothing left to differentiate it, and the company that had defined the category had no second value ready.

This is the ordinary fate of a successful promise: competitors copy it, and in time customers simply expect it. Companies that live through the moment usually have a reserve of values waiting behind the first one.

The same object, a different reason to buy it

The Impossible Project relaunched the product without the original promise. Its film was slower than Polaroid’s had been, and less reliable. By the logic of the old proposition it was worse on every axis. Buyers came anyway, because they were paying for something else: a single physical picture, impossible to duplicate, that took its time to appear and could come out a little wrong.

In our reading this is the clearest kind of value evolution: the object stays the same and the meaning moves. When every phone delivers a picture in a second, a picture that takes minutes and exists only once starts to mean something. The scarcity of each print, the waiting, the imperfection, the fact that it can be held and given away, became the value. The flaws of the reinvented film, which would have been fatal to the old promise, read as character under the new one.

The revival had another winner

Polaroid did not have the instant revival to itself. Fujifilm launched Instax in 1998, kept making instant film through the years when Polaroid stopped, and announced in April 2025 that it had sold 100 million Instax cameras and printers. The new value was available to anyone holding the technology, and the company that never left the category was well placed to collect it.

That is the limit of a rescue built on a name. A brand can be bought back, and the meaning customers attach to it can return with it, but the category moves on its own schedule. The lesson for a company whose founding promise is turning into a standard is to look for the second value early, inside the product you already make, while there is still a business to fund the search. If you want your team able to spot that moment and name the next value, train your team in the method.