By Ashley Wong | Photography by Bobby Beasley for WSJ. Magazine
It's a gray plastic cube, about 2 inches on each side, lighter than a deck of cards, and it's here to solve our screen-time crisis.
At least, that's the pitch from the Gen Z founders of Brick. For $60, the device connects to an app that blocks distracting apps on a user's phone.
Users stay "Bricked" — the company's term for being cut off from digital temptation — until they tap the phone against the cube. Using NFC technology, the physical device connects with the app and restores access.
It's the latest tool for reducing screen time, a potent device for the times when avoiding Instagram or TikTok can't be accomplished with willpower alone. And in an era of techlash, when many consumers are looking for ways to reject the trappings of digital life, the product has also become something of a status symbol.
Users post screenshots of their Bricked phones on social media — broadcasting an out-of-office message, of sorts, or boasting about their unreachability. Lifestyle influencers including Brett Chody extol its benefits. Lorde, Bowen Yang, Mandy Moore and Conan O'Brien are among its famous adopters.
On a May episode of his podcast, O'Brien said that he has friends who get frustrated by his delayed text responses when he's Bricked.
"They're so used to getting an immediate dopamine hit that they forget they're talking to someone who isn't walking around looking at their phone all the time," he said.
Brick's founders, both computer scientists, say they are hardly Luddites.
"We love technology, we love building," co-founder TJ Driver, 26, said in an interview. "We're engineers."
But before they started the company, they were grappling with a very contemporary dilemma.
"The technology that we love is oftentimes the thing getting in the way of us doing what matters in our lives," Driver said.
Driver and his 27-year-old co-founder Zach Nasgowitz have been friends since they were first-graders in Milwaukee. After they graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they tried to launch a few apps together, none of which fully took off.
Throughout it all, "we kept running into the same problem: We were constantly distracted by our phones and wasting hours a day that we wanted to spend on more important things," Nasgowitz said in an email. "We had tried screen-time tools, but they were too easy to override."
In January 2023, they quit their jobs as software developers to build Brick out of Nasgowitz's parents' basement, handmaking their first "brick" out of wood with help from Nasgowitz's father. They went through dozens of designs and sizes with help from a 3-D printer, before officially launching in September 2023.
About three months later, Driver was at a Green Bay Packers game when Nasgowitz texted him: A social-media post someone made about their product had gone viral. Suddenly, they had 1,000 orders — a daunting fulfillment task for two guys who were still assembling, glueing and packaging Bricks themselves. Back then they were making, at most, 10 a day; now they outsource manufacturing to China.
The Brick is one of many programs and gadgets that have hit the market to help people who feel chained to their devices. Apple has built-in screen-time limits that users can tailor to their needs. Bloom, another phone-locking app, requires a tap against a card to restore access. Other apps, including Focus Friend and Forest, gamify and reward putting down the phone. There are even miniature jails you can lock your phone in.
None eliminate the root problem. Some Brick users have taken to public forums to say the device didn't make a dent in their phone habits. Which raises the question: Why buy another gadget instead of simply exercising self-control?
"I don't think about it as willpower. 'Oh, do I need to stop using this or not? Can I prevent myself from opening this app?'" Driver said. "It's about designing your environment so that you don't have to ask those questions."
The founders declined to share sales data or user figures. According to Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company, downloads of the app began to rise from just over 14,000 last October to 33,710 in November. They jumped to 103,632 in January. In May, the number of downloads was about 59,729.
Chody, the influencer and social-media manager, said she got a Brick in March.
"My entire life is on my phone," Chody said. "I'm talking like double-digit screen time on average every day. I started getting to a point where I was like, 'I don't even want to be scrolling right now,' but I felt like I was just so addicted."
Though she occasionally found herself automatically grabbing her locked phone during the first few weeks of using Brick, over time the impulse became less frequent. Her screen time now averages about six hours a day. Considering the fact she used to spend 10 or 12 hours a day on the phone, it's a "big improvement," she said.
Write to Ashley Wong at ashley.wong@wsj.com