Method to the Madness
Do you have a soap problem in your house? Is your bathroom missing hand soap, or is anti-bacterial cleaner missing from your kitchen?
Chances are pretty good, if you live in the United States, that it isn't. Advertisers spent the last century working to make sure that most Americans have their soap and cleaning supply problem taken care of. Fortunately for hygiene and health, they've largely succeeded...almost no one is in search of a new cleaning product. The ones we already have work well enough.
There were a couple of guys who didn't think this was true. And they did something about it.
Method is on a mission to redesign soap. It wasn't broken to begin with, but they decided to fix it, and lots of people have decided they agree with them enough to buy their products. If you've ever seen the rack of Method brand soaps on display on the shelf at Target, then you have a sense of why: their choice of colors and bottle shapes, all put together, are very visually striking.
Oxo did this ten years ago with kitchen utensils. No one was busy looking for a better onion peeler, but Oxo created one, and an ostentatious one, at that. People browsing merchandise in Sur La Table went for it.
It's not the only reason, but the successes of these companies was aided in very, very large part by the design of the products. Sometimes the success is in spite of the design...think of Herman Miller's Aeron chair, which looks like a giant arthropod. But they happened not just because someone decided to build a better mousetrap, but because they insisted that the mousetrap should look good at the same time.
Speaking of which, as far as I know, no one's tried to build a more elegant mousetrap in the last ten years. That goes for a lot of household products. What are you keeping under your sinks and televisions that could be re-designed in some way?
Chances are pretty good, if you live in the United States, that it isn't. Advertisers spent the last century working to make sure that most Americans have their soap and cleaning supply problem taken care of. Fortunately for hygiene and health, they've largely succeeded...almost no one is in search of a new cleaning product. The ones we already have work well enough.
There were a couple of guys who didn't think this was true. And they did something about it.
Method is on a mission to redesign soap. It wasn't broken to begin with, but they decided to fix it, and lots of people have decided they agree with them enough to buy their products. If you've ever seen the rack of Method brand soaps on display on the shelf at Target, then you have a sense of why: their choice of colors and bottle shapes, all put together, are very visually striking.
Oxo did this ten years ago with kitchen utensils. No one was busy looking for a better onion peeler, but Oxo created one, and an ostentatious one, at that. People browsing merchandise in Sur La Table went for it.
It's not the only reason, but the successes of these companies was aided in very, very large part by the design of the products. Sometimes the success is in spite of the design...think of Herman Miller's Aeron chair, which looks like a giant arthropod. But they happened not just because someone decided to build a better mousetrap, but because they insisted that the mousetrap should look good at the same time.
Speaking of which, as far as I know, no one's tried to build a more elegant mousetrap in the last ten years. That goes for a lot of household products. What are you keeping under your sinks and televisions that could be re-designed in some way?