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From Drab to Fab

Formerly style-impaired manufacturers like Whirlpool and Master Lock are now cranking out great-looking stuff. Here's how.
By Jason Tanz

Whirlpool's Administrative Center in Benton Harbor, Mich., looks exactly as you'd expect a 92-year-old home-appliance company's headquarters to look: like the most depressing high school in America. The carpeting is gray. The walls are beige. The institutional-white stairwells are bedecked with those lame motivational posters that seem incapable of eliciting any emotion other than resigned alienation. Dilbert would be perfectly at home here.

But walk a few hundred feet across the Whirlpool campus to the newly renovated offices of the four-year-old global consumer design department, and the mood changes instantly. The building's exposed ducts and bright colors seem like what you'd get if the architects of the Pompidou Center designed a children's hospital. The waiting room sports an iMac, classic Eames chairs, a book about the work of architect Michael Graves. Oh, and a seven-foot-tall, fluorescent-lit display of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award that Whirlpool won last year. Over the past few years the company has won several such awards, including four from the Industrial Designers Society of America. In 2001 a selection of Whirlpool prototypes-new concepts for how microwave ovens could look, feel, and operate-were displayed at the Louvre. It may come as a surprise to those of us who associate the brand with rows of identical, blocky appliances, but it's true: Whirlpool has gone high design.

Unless you've been trapped under a plaid sectional sofa for the past few years, you probably already know that design sells, and not just to the black-turtleneck set. America's consumers-their aesthetic senses sharpened by everything from the Design Within Reach catalog to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-increasingly think that how a product looks is as important as how well it works. That's why we've put together this special report on design, including our roundup of the 25 best products of 2003, created by companies large and small (see The 25 Best Products of the Year ).

Appearance can have a huge effect on how much money a product makes. For example, Apple has sold 1.4 million of its brilliantly minimal iPod MP3 players for hundreds of dollars a pop since they debuted two years ago. Target's witty Michael Graves-designed housewares fly off the shelves. And let's not even talk about Herman Miller's Aeron chair. Of course, it's no surprise that companies like Apple and Herman Miller are good at design. What is surprising is how many downright dowdy manufacturers are successfully reinventing themselves as design-driven shops. Master Lock, for instance, would be happy to sell you one of its sleek new Titanium Series padlocks, developed with the aid of Design Continuum in Boston. (If you're not crazy about this particular model, don't worry. "We change our designs every year, almost like the auto industry," says John Heppner, Master Lock's president and COO.) AC Delco now offers a car jack that mirrors the curves and colors of the wackiest concept car. And in the past few years the Stanley Works-a 160-year-old company-has released a raft of new offerings that range from a one-piece Antivibe hammer that cuts down on vibration to a laser-equipped stud finder. "You're seeing lots of companies that have very good technological histories saying, 'That's great, but it's not enough in this marketplace,' " says Virginia Postrel, a columnist for the New York Times and author of the new book The Substance of Style. "Now they're trying to find a way of using design to make their technologies resonate."

It's working. In 2001, Whirlpool introduced its Duet line of washers and dryers, which have soft curves and splashes of color; now the company has 19% of the front-loading washer market, up from zero two years ago. In 1999, Coleman revamped the design of its coolers to make them look more streamlined; by 2001 its cooler sales had increased 40%, and Coleman led the category for the first time in ten years. (It sells 100,000 of its hip solid-steel coolers-which retail for around $100-annually.) And in the two years since it was released, Stanley's newest Antivibe has become one of America's top-selling hammers.

It's hard to overstate the magnitude of such changes. When Karim Rashid moved to New York in 1992, for example, most large companies had no interest in his message about the competitive advantage of good design. Rashid arrived in the city, penniless, after his contract as a faculty member at Rhode Island School of Design was not renewed. The problem, he says, was his emphasis on broad philosophical issues, including manufacturability and the role design can play in society. "They told me I was teaching theory, not design," Rashid says. (A RISD spokesperson says the school felt "his energies were better served promoting his own designs.")

So he sold his record collection for $4,000 and traveled across the country, visiting nearly 100 companies, including Ethan Allen and Gillette, hoping to find a more sympathetic audience. "No one listened to what I was saying," he says. "They all kind of laughed and rolled their eyes and went back to their jobs."

They should have listened. In 1996, Rashid created the Garbo wastebasket-a beautifully curvy piece of translucent plastic-for housewares firm Umbra. To date the Garbo family of wastebaskets has sold 2.7 million units, and the original design is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Rashid has also designed tabletop items for Nambe, furniture pieces for Italian maker Edra, fragrance packaging for Tommy Hilfiger, a chess set for Bozart, even a manhole cover for Con Edison. Rashid-a man not known for modesty-estimates that his products have generated $50 million in sales for the companies with which he works.

If Rashid's message was correct 11 years ago, it is even more apt today. Because of globalization, U.S. companies are finding it harder and harder to compete on price-making the pressure to add value ever greater. "Manufacturers have begun to recognize that we can't compete with the pricing structure and labor costs of the Far East," says Paul Thompson, director of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. "So how can we compete? It has to be with design."

But let's face it: Not all design is good design. For every iPod, it seems, there's a Pontiac Aztek. "There are some venerable old companies-Black & Decker, DeWalt-that get it," says Mark Dziersk, senior vice president of design at the Chicago design firm Herbst Lazar Bell. "But we're still talking about 2% of what's being built."

How do the savviest companies come up with designs that excite consumers and spur sales? For starters, they don't make the design department a product's last stop after it has already passed through the engineering and manufacturing departments. "Design used to be perceived very much as an afterthought," says Charles Jones, Whirlpool's vice president of global consumer design. "There was almost a drive-up mentality, where the product engineers or marketers would throw something over the wall for designers to make it look halfway decent at the 11th hour."

No more. Jones was promoted in 1999 as part of a mandate to make Whirlpool's major brands-including Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Kenmore-"stand out from the sea of white boxes on retail floors," says CEO David R. Whitwam. Jones's first step was to devise a "visual brand language" for each brand that would help it create an emotional connection with its target audience. Whirlpool wanted the KitchenAid line, for instance, to appeal to home enthusiasts. So Jones's staff gathered a group of them and showed photos of hundreds of products and images, asking them to select the ones that resonated with them. Jones then sought out common elements among the favorites and used his findings to create guidelines-a bull-nosed treatment to communicate heft; analog dials and controls-for the signature elements of every KitchenAid appliance. "You know a BMW when you see it coming down the road," Jones says. "That's what we want to get to."

Some companies are also rethinking the way they use design firms. For years all of Coleman's outsourced projects were managed by engineers. But in 1999 the company hired an in-house industrial-design department. The designers were able to determine a product's guidelines with the engineering and marketing departments before calling an outside firm, which meant fewer false starts and frustrating back-and-forths. The in-house designers were also able to provide more meaningful feedback and negotiate better contracts. "We have actually decreased our design expenditures while increasing our output," says senior vice president Brian Rawson. "And our outsourced design firms are also much happier with us."

In fact, if you look at the corporate ranks of some of the biggest companies in the country, chances are becoming greater that you'll find a design professional somewhere in there. Take Claudia Kotchka, whom Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford's business and engineering schools, calls "the most powerful design executive in the country." Two years ago Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley promoted Kotchka-who once headed P&G's design staff-to the newly created position of vice president of design innovation and strategy. Her charge, she says, is "building design into the DNA of P&G." One of Kotchka's first steps was to give design its own department-previously designers served in the marketing department-and expand its scope. "We've now got designers out with our R&D organization, helping to come up with ideas," she says. "That's a big change for us." When Olay developed an antiaging technology, for instance, the design staff sat down with the marketing and R&D departments to help determine what form the product would take, how it should feel, what its packaging should look like, and what it should be called. The result, Olay Regenerist, was outselling all its competitors within six weeks of its launch last spring.

Another place where designers are starting to wield serious power is Detroit. The automotive industry has had an on-again, off-again love affair with designers since the late 1920s. But over the past couple of decades, design has taken a back seat to fuel efficiency and power. That has all changed in recent years. Six years ago Ford hired J Mays-the creator of the revamped Volkswagen Beetle-to work his retro-futurist magic on the company's offerings. This July, with the announcement that "we are emphasizing the importance of product design on our revitalization," Ford CEO Bill Ford promoted Mays to group vice president, a position that answers directly to the COO. It's the first time a designer has ever held such a lofty position at the company. "[The promotion] allows me to untether myself from just saying, 'This is the way the sheet metal should look,' and get more into the positioning of our brands," Mays says.

It may seem odd to hear a designer discuss brand positioning. Get over it. No longer the wacky freethinkers whose work may never exist anywhere beyond their sketchpads and computer screens, designers are developing serious business chops, becoming better versed in the concerns of the manufacturing, finance, and marketing departments. "Design has expanded its definition to include creating, recognizing, and developing opportunities to build business," says Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO, a design firm based in Palo Alto. "I'm amazed at how diversified designers' skills have become," says William Cesaroni, the president of Cesaroni Design Associates, an industrial-design firm in Chicago. "They can step into a meeting, defend the design they think is correct, and negotiate with engineers as to how to manufacture it sensibly."

More business-savvy designers are on the way, thanks to design schools that emphasize corporate skills as well as draftsmanship. Northwestern's master's program in product development, introduced last year through its McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, includes courses in basic accounting, marketing, conflict resolution, statistics, and ethics. Design programs at Stanford and the Illinois Institute of Technology are also adding business courses to their curriculums.

As designers become more worldly, they and their bosses are starting to realize that many skills, such as interpreting customer needs and rapid prototyping, can extend beyond the confines of the design department. "Design has to be seen as a cultural cornerstone-it can't report to marketing," says Herbst Lazar Bell's Dziersk. "There's an argument that in the next ten years, marketing will report to design." Can a new, better-designed world be far behind?