2000 302: Fogbank Sassie

Speculative provenance: inventing a backstory is irresistible. Suppose Fogbank Sassie started as a one-off from an independent workshop named Fogbank Studios that specialized in custom urban vehicles and oddball instruments. In 2000 they released the Sassie 302 as a small-batch run: three hundred and two units, each hand-numbered, sold mostly through word-of-mouth and a single listing in a city zine. Owners would be a diaspora of creative kinds: a film-school director who used it to ferry cameras, a luthier who turned the instrument into a weird amp, and a late-night radio host who plays records through its reverb. Over two decades, the model becomes a cult classic — too rare to be widely known, perfect as a secret handshake for those who do know.