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How Thomas Meyerhoffer designs our favorite things

ONE MORNING THIS spring, Thomas Meyerhoffer had a breakthrough on the race track—which made him furious. In recent years, the acclaimed 52-year-old industrial designer has thrown himself into motorsports, training at the Porsche Sport Driving School and, beginning in 2016, competing in the Pirelli GT3 Cup, a series for elite amateurs. At the Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California, he dropped his lap time by three and a half seconds—an eternity. “I came out of the car and I was so angry,” he says. “I was just thinking, Why didn’t I do that before? It was so simple.”

Meyerhoffer is obsessed with simplicity. The remarkably diverse range of mold-demolishing sports products he has created—the first wraparound ski goggles, the Smith V3; a no-fuss rear-entry snowboard binding for Flow that offered the control of a strap-in; award-winning Neil Pryde windsurf sails—have been celebrated for their elegant austerity. He has an uncanny ability to find the cleanest line connecting form and function. Even his show-stopping designs, like the translucent Apple eMate (an iMac precursor that the company’s chief design officer, Jonathan Ive, tapped Meyerhoffer to develop ) and his hour glass-shaped long boards, which he introduced nine years ago to great confusion in the surf industry, adhere to his Scandinavian aesthetic. (He was born and raised in Sweden.)