Trusting Your Senses - Doc Kaps and His Impossible Project To Save Polaroid

You’re a friend of mine if you think that daydreaming is an art form. If you’d rather catch raindrops with your tongue instead of playing computer games. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! 

That’s why I knew I’d love Florian Doc Kaps: he’s a champion of all things analogue, an out of the box thinker who believes that people are too swamped with digital things in our lives. He believes that we should on our five senses to make decisions about business, love, family and friends. 

Former biologist who was a foremost authority on spider eye movement (I didn’t know that was a thing until I met Doc), he is also the entrepreneur who literally saved Polaroid instant photography from extinction. 

Do you know those big, instant cameras that make a loud click when you take a snapshot? It spits out an undeveloped photograph into your hand? Doc saved that.

In 2008 the company that owned that instant film, Polaroid, was planning to shut down the last factory where it was made. Boom. The End. No more Polaroid. The end of instant photography as we knew it.

Then along came Doc. He literally bought the Polaroid factory before they shut it down forever. He calls his arduous journey An Impossible Project They made a film about it, too. If you own one of those vintage cameras or see an instant photo on a refrigerator you can thank Doc. 

My Tools For Nomads episode with Doc Kaps explores how he saved Polaroid from extinction. We went deep into the mind of Doc and talked about the importance of analogue in our lives, about the lost art of daydreaming, his experience-store called Supersense, and what it was like growing up in Vienna, birthplace of Mozart, Beethoven and Freud. 

You’ll love Doc Kaps just as I do. 

Listen and be inspired!