8. Building a Design-Driven Culture
You have to design and build the organizational culture to serve the intended customer experience. If you don’t do this, you cannot achieve success that lasts.
Throughout this book, you have seen many examples of companies that get it right, and others that don’t. Here’s the thing. It’s possible that five years from now some might have slipped, while others might have found their stride again. It has become something of a spectator sport for people to look at the companies offered as models in books like In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, or Good to Great to see how they’ve done lately, particularly if they appear to have faltered or lost their way a bit. We believe there are lessons for us all if we look to learn rather than to be right. Ideas are important. Start with the ideas and the specifics of the "how to" will be forthcoming. What follows are a few broad brushstrokes.
Life and business are all about change, and that calls for an approach that centers on a culture built to deal with change. A design-driven company has that. Who is to say that Apple, IKEA, BMW, and others might not stumble. But it’s less likely if they stay true to the course they are on. So, we’re not giving you models to watch and copy, but examples of what works or doesn’t work so you can understand the design-driven approach and use it yourself. We’ve drawn examples from an array of products and services to help you begin thinking in a generalized way about how design affects every aspect of almost everything. It is up to you to put the ideas to work so as to ensure that the ultimate all-around experience of your customer is something special. We have witnessed too many corporate meetings where concern for the customer experience is not even a concept, let alone a driver of design. A design-driven corporate culture is also not a "plug it in and there you go" kind of package. The basics are adaptable to different circumstances and environments.
Let’s look at some of the core aspects of a design-driven company. They represent a consolidation of ideas we have explored so far. It just so happens that they can be arranged to form the acronym FLAVOR. A lot of business books seem determined to add yet another acronym to the heaping pile and purport that it will be the Holy Grail or panacea for the ills of business. Well, we aren’t trying to do that—we just couldn’t help ourselves. In fact, it would be better if you just think of FLAVOR as a mnemonic for easily recalling some of the core aspects as you create a design for customer experience supply chain management. Here is what the letters stand for:
Now, let’s zoom in and explore what each one means, and how they must synchronize and work together.
Focus
You go to check in at a La Quinta Inn at 11 a.m. and ask if you can check in early so you can wind down from travel, clean up, and be ready for a 3:30 p.m. meeting. Sarah, the reception clerk says, "Sorry. We can’t let anyone check in before 3 p.m. so the maids have time to clean all the rooms." You try to get the clerk to bend, but it’s not possible, she says. You think, "This isn’t about what is convenient for me. It’s about what’s convenient for them." So you cancel your reservation, drive to the Sheraton, and they let you in right away. Somewhere up the experience chain at La Quinta someone has made a rigid rule that no one checks in before 3 p.m. Or, and this is more likely, that’s just the way the clerk hears or perceives this is the way things work and doesn’t feel empowered enough to buck it. In time, the rigidity is part of the experience and the CEO begins to scratch a bewildered head and wonders why the numbers are slipping.
Contrast this with the Nordstrom clerk, or the one at Whole Foods who goes into the back room to get you exactly what you want. Huge difference. A measurable difference. A "Do You Matter" difference. A difference of focus. A focus on the customer experience. This is the emphasis on clearly architecting what you put out that people see, touch, and feel, and how it defines you in their hearts.
Your entire organizational culture—in other words, how everybody thinks, behaves, and is rewarded—must be aligned to deliver on the design of the intended customer experience. This is customer experience supply chain management at work.
This focus on what your customers feel is not just for front-line employees. It’s key to every aspect of a service or product. Focus on not just the design of the experience and then on the delivery, focus also on the customers’ emotional response to that delivery. Look to see if they respond in the way you intended. Notice if they discover desirable qualities about your products and services that represent serendipitous outcomes of the development process rather than something that was consciously designed in at the beginning. What your customer values might come as a surprise to you, or at least not be fully understood. This is a really big idea. It is so easy to imagine they will value what you value. They value what they value. Maybe that matches what you value. Maybe not.
Polaroid is a really great example of a company not understanding the valued experience. Because, what was always so fantastic about Polaroid cameras was not the film, it was the instant gratification, the instant. Click, bzzzt, you watched the picture develop. That was the experience. It was simple. You point, you push the button; you get a picture. There was the whole magic quality of how it occurred, and the cameras had this interesting quality about them. If ever a company should have been the first to grasp the significance of digital photography, it should have been Polaroid. I mean, it was Polaroid that invented the instant experience; that was the benefit. But through the years, they came to think it was about the camera. They worried about protecting their film business. The worst form of arrogance is thinking the customer’s experience isn’t your teacher. One of the saddest scenarios is where companies get this, then forget it or lose it or become unresponsive.
If the customer says, "Hey, can I get my name on my shoes? I’d be willing to pay more for that." Nike says, "Can do." If a person wants his or her picture on a bottle of soda, Jones Soda says, "Coming right up." If you want your company name on your business credit cards, the Advanta Bank Corporation says you can, and that helps it stand out in the crowd. If you’re the business that’s still standing with planted feet while saying, "No. It’s not about what’s convenient for you, or neat, or fun for you. It’s about what’s most convenient to us," then pretty soon you’ll end up on life support or in an untimely grave.
But don’t get us wrong. This is not about just saying yes all the time and always giving people what they want. That is not the right approach. It is about understanding their needs and desires, and meeting them. And doing it in a way uniquely yours that has them loving your company. This is ultimately what design will do for you.
Long-Term
Legend has it that shortly before his death, Mao Zedong was asked what he thought about the French Revolution. "Too soon to tell" was his answer. (Actually, it’s a good guess that it was Chou En Lai, an avid student of French history, who said this, though precisely when, or to whom, isn’t clear.) While we are not proposing this concept of long-term here, we nevertheless want to make the point that this peculiarly American preoccupation with instant gratification is not a good trait when you want to realign your culture to the realities of becoming one that is design driven. It takes a deliberate practice and time.
Samsung is a great example of how they’ve used design over the last 10 years to really redefine themselves as a world electronics leader. Every year they get incrementally better at what they’re doing, to the point where they’ve pretty much eclipsed Sony. Samsung products are landing on the objects of lust lists put out by the media. Their equity in people’s minds is really high. That was an overt strategy; it did not just happen. The thing is, they decided more than 10 years ago they were going to become a design leader. With a step-by-deliberately-design-driven-step process in place, Samsung is pulling it off.
At the risk of being a little tongue in cheek, we assert that it takes a long-term deliberate focus on the customer experience supply chain to produce instant gratification and delight for your customers. Apple seems to get this, as does IKEA, BMW, and Harley Davidson, along with the other businesses we have cited as being design driven. But, again, don’t do like they do. Do like you need to do. Every business must design its own long-term strategy tailored to all the aspects that orchestrate delivery of what matters to its customer base, this year, and next year, and the years after that.
As Yves Béhar, designer of the Leaf Lamp and the $100 laptop, and founder of FuseProject, puts it, "Design is not a short-term fix. It’s a long-term engagement that requires you to think about how design affects everything that touches the consumer—from product to packaging to marketing to retail to the take-home experience."[32]
All you really need to do to grasp this concept is look around and find the companies that you can identify as design driven and see who is still around. Who keeps reinventing themselves and who always seems fresh and unique in a world where things all too quickly become the same and evolve into yet another commodity. It is not enough to do this just once, to be a one-trick pony. You have to do it again and again and again, and to do that you have to have design throughout the fabric of your company and it has to be an active ingredient and it has to be part of your future quite a ways out.
Authentic
As recognized in the case of the airlines, the idea can be as sound as you like, but if the crew, for whatever reason, doesn’t focus on creating great customer experiences, and instead allow the flight to be an aerial roller-coaster trip through hell, then all the other elements are wasted. If your slogan is "We Care," this had better be the case. If your customer is to have this experience, and if you are the CEO, you and your senior team had better practice behaviors that your employees experience are consistent with the slogan; that the company cares about them too. Otherwise, they will just be going through the motions with your customers, wondering all the while what exactly are the motions they are supposed to be going through. Authenticity matters. Authenticity demands that corporate and individual behavior be consistent with the intended experience design. Bottom line is that your customers are smarter and more perceptive than you think. It has to be real and based on a commitment. Or people will feel it, and they will suspect they are being deceived. People are learning to be aware of empty words.
If we continue with the airlines as an example, you’ve got all the other carriers in there battling it out, and along comes Branson, and founds Virgin. His board thought it was a lousy idea and he did it anyway. The brand is aspirational (you see, the language thing again). An aspirational product, service, or brand, is one that a significant portion of the market desires but maybe can’t afford, or it’s one that shares its sizzle with the user who is aware that he or she is getting in on something that not everyone gets to enjoy. A lot of people, especially as you get to the younger generations, want to be a rock star, want to be treated like a rock star, be associated with something like that, so that’s where the Virgin experience appeals.
They really have succeeded in building Virgin Airlines as an iconic brand in a very short amount of time. Now what did they do differently? And why could they do it. Why are United and American struggling to provide a great customer experience? (You can figure out the answers by now.) Will Virgin be able to maintain altitude as they grow? They’ve built a classic, narrowly focused brand and, to quote one of their ads: "We have more experience than our name would suggest." With Virgin America, they are trying to cross over to engage a broader customer base. The iPod was narrowly focused on the younger generation and successfully crossed over to become multi-generational. Can Virgin do this? Without Branson? Too soon to tell.
If Virgin America can take that sort of, "Hey-we’re-a-little-hip," rock star idea, and build it out, they could be very successful. In the design strategy process, they have to ask, "How are they going to design the continuing experience?" They’ve got this core brand that’s associated with edgy, rock, that sort of vibe, and want to take it mainstream and still continue to build that cache that’ll make people want to join their parade. If you’re a low-cost carrier, you can get away with a little funkiness and being a little different. But it can’t be artificial funkiness. It has to be the real thing, and that makes all the difference. People can tell if it is not authentic. If it’s all just a veneer, they’ll flip the bozo bit on you like they did on Motorola.
© Michael F. McLaughlin
A good example of design strategy that achieved and sustained authenticity was the IBM ThinkPad. As we speculated earlier, it’s going to be interesting and perhaps sad to see what Lenovo does now that it has acquired the ThinkPad line. If the company doesn’t "get" what makes the product matter to its customers, they are likely to destroy it. If you look at IBM when they started the ThinkPad line, they took some of the corporate feel of their products, and then Richard Sapper, who developed this very minimal, functional-looking, almost military grade product. And they realized it struck a chord with business people, and they continued to develop that and refine it. It’s very clearly a positioning strategy. When you look at all the notebooks in the world, the two iconic notebook brands were the ThinkPad and the PowerBook. And they’re very different. IBM very overtly went about doing that, saying "We’re going to be different from Apple."
If a business person interested in design had to buy a Windows-based notebook, nine out of ten times he or she tended to choose a ThinkPad. IBM is not necessarily a cool brand, but it is authentic, used very clearly as a continuing positioning strategy. With great success. Lenovo now needs to nurture the brand and leverage the equity that came with the brand.
Clearly, authenticity is also yours to lose. Recall what happened to Dell when in the name of saving money it outsourced customer service, and many middle Americans, whether from legitimate concerns or just down-home xenophobia, claimed it couldn’t understand the customer service reps. This was almost like a tipping point in reverse—where a company does something that damages them. So Dell scrambled and went into damage control mode and perhaps spent all the money they thought they’d saved trying to make things right. The same thing happened when Home Depot tried to save money by switching to inexpensive labor instead of continuing with their foundational strategy, which was to employ retired contractors who really could deliver on the promise "you can do it, we can help." The loss of authenticity doesn’t always come from money issues, but often it does, and the public can smell and sense deception along with broken promises.
It’s so very easy to do; to destroy or cripple everything you’ve built. Some front-line manager makes a crazy decision and nobody catches it in time, and you can destroy your brand. JetBlue is a testimonial to this. The company was climbing the skies with a burgeoning business base on a unique, authentic experience, and then suddenly you leave people stranded for eleven hours on a runway and things start to slip. They didn’t cause the initial hit; weather did. But in weeks, the crews weren’t as chipper, the on-board snacks were suddenly downsized, and the authentic energy was fading. Along the way, their stock price has fallen to around $5.00 (as we write this), down from around $27.00 when they were flying high. In a just-released survey, JetBlue made the top three for customer satisfaction and is now gaining altitude again.
Authenticity is again a system-wide thing. If Betty, at her checkout at Wal-Mart, draws more customers to her line, but her manager doesn’t understand that what’s going on is authenticity at work, then it’s a random event that’s largely wasted as far as impacting the corporate culture goes. Authenticity is missing in a product if something looks as if it will last forever but the damn thing falls apart as soon as you get it home. And the authenticity really slips to the dark side when you try to get the broken thing fixed or replaced, and you get a customer service rep who you quickly perceive would just as soon take a long walk on a short pier. Authenticity is something you can’t fake on any level. The consequences of getting caught trying to fake it can be terminal.
Vigilant
You need to constantly stay on top of the customer experience supply chain. Change is going to happen. That’s a given. Some of your vigilance is going to be watching your competitors, but don’t waste a lot of cycles thinking that’s where the enemy is. The enemy is you if you pull a Polaroid and get beaten at the game you invented. You need to be relentless to get great design out to the market. You need to sweat the details. By way of example, Apple designers spend 10 percent of their time on concept, and 90 percent on implementation.
Design-driven vigilance is a considered awareness. It’s not stark paranoia that makes you determine your strategy based on what the competition is doing. The folks at BlackBerry are obviously aware of the iPhone. If they are being true to their own culture, they are also looking to the future and a design strategy that will keep their brand alive and vigorous in the guts of their customers. As we write this, BlackBerry devices have about 40 percent of the Smart phone business, while the iPhone has garnered about 25 percent (in a little more than six months). Apple is now deploying their exceptional abilities to make the iPhone enterprise friendly and have added push email, an official Software Developers Kit, and a brilliant distribution model for native iPhone applications. Apple is poised to be the dominant player in the smart phone space for the next decade or two.
We know we are beating the Apple example to death, but it drives home the point. The goal was to make a mobile phone device people loved. The iPhone is a great user experience. End of story. Apple’s approach to design—a vigilant focus on what mattered to the end user—drove development and shaped all the technology to pull off a marvel of convergence. Apple changed the game. Now everybody is eating their dust. Research In Motion (RIM), the developers of BlackBerry, will be under tremendous pressure. They definitely need to matter to their current customers. And they have to continue to lead with design in a way that is both authentic and relentless. They cannot start to chase.
Vigilance is also "forward looking" as well as keeping track of what is going on around you. In that way, it’s like continuous due diligence. You want to prospect and prognosticate about future trends as they are shaping. Will manufacturing continue its shift to the Pacific Rim, or will factions continue to expand in Brazil, Mexico, or elsewhere? On a recent trip to China, we met a leading footwear designer who was making the journey to begin moving some manufacturing lines to North Vietnam because it was cheaper. As a global society, will we get the underlying message of the MasterCard Priceless campaign, that "there are some things in life money can’t buy, for everything else…?" At the end of the day, it is about the experience. A relentless focus on price and cost structures can easily degrade the customer experience to the point that no one cares about you anymore.
People will pay a premium for a better experience. In fact this might be the only thing that they will consistently pay a premium for. That’s a hard concept for the Excel crowd to get.
But more than anything else, vigilance is about working great design across the system. If you take your eyes off the ball, it will degrade. This is just human nature. The natural forces of entropy. To do great design, you must be willing to invest all the way across the customer experience supply chain. In the case of a product, it is not just the concept, but also every detail until it gets into your customers’ hands. And then some.
Original
You might think originality is just about being different, off the wall, outside the box. That’s one perception, but this is really the area where the approach to risk matters, and the approach to research matters. Research can actually hold back originality, especially when it comes to the committee style of thinking to be found in traditional focus groups. How valuable research is to the design effort and to understanding the customer experience depends on who does it. Some people do it very well and some people don’t, and some people don’t do it at all. Apple does very little research.
Research is a tool to be used diligently and appropriately. It’s not the end-all. A lot of times, if used improperly, it can actually lead to bad design, or even worse, mediocre design. The goal of research should not be to purely sample public opinion. The goal of the research, relative to design, is to discover an opportunity, design to the opportunity, and then validate what you’ve come up with to see if you got it right. Of course, there are a variety of forms of research, and different ways of understanding demographics and getting to know what it is that a certain sector of people like and don’t like. As you’re developing products, it’s important to understand all this stuff, who you are trying to target, as well as the experience you want to provide. That’s really important. Where research becomes a trap is when it crosses over to risk mitigation. The old "we’ll go out and sample some small groups of people and see what they think of our design" trap.
The challenge is that really good innovative design tends to break norms, and most people right off the street have a hard time getting their heads around that. They like what they know. They like things that are familiar, maybe a little beyond familiar, but not much. You present something new to people like that and most won’t vote for something that’s too original. They might if they come to use it for awhile. But they can’t articulate an experience they haven’t had yet. People have a hard time getting outside their normal idea of what a product is and can do. We’ve observed an example recently that was developed in a careful and extensive manner to create a fantastic new experience. However, upon the release, the product was jumped upon by the media and blogs. In these cases, the vast majority of the negative review was from people who had never actually seen the device "in the flesh," let alone used one. But those "early adopters" who had experienced using the product, loved it. The main lesson here is that although people’s initial reaction was often negative, as word of mouth from deliriously happy users has grown, the device has become recognized as the best in its category ever created. And the manufacturer cannot build them fast enough.
So the key to using research effectively is to identify your target customer, to observe their lives, to discover the things that are giving them trouble, discover the things that are giving them pleasure, all that emotional-level content, and then use that information to go off and develop ideas.
At some point, later on, when you think you’ve got something, you set it down in front of the same people and see if they can turn it on, see if they can find the power button or not. You also want to learn how people feel about it, which is not the same as whether they like it. If you go for that before the idea has been fleshed out into a design-driven product, you might see good ideas get shot down or watered down just to try and build some consensus among a diverse group of people. When it comes to building a successful brand, you need to be about focus, so you don’t want to try and make everybody happy. You want to find something that certainly doesn’t offend a lot of people, and most of all, you want to excite people and draw them in, have them feel as if they are joining something. We like to employ the 80/20 rule. You want 80 percent of the market to love it. But also you’d like 20 percent to be challenged by it.
Risk is a necessary part of being original. At Apple, it is part of the deliberate strategy, and has been so for so long that it’s now almost cultural DNA. Failing is fine if you are trying to move the bar forward. If you are just stupid and fail, then you are likely to be labeled an idiot and you don’t last. On the other hand, for people who are trying to do something new with an idea aimed at moving forward, their attempt is celebrated even if the product doesn’t sell. One of the Apple marketing talents presented that the second or third generation of any product always outsold the first generation by a mile. The first generation would be an inch tall on a bar graph, and the next one would be three inches, and the next one would be six inches, because of the learning that occurred.
Apple constantly learned about what was good and what was not, so the customer base kept building, accepting that the product would improve and anticipating that change. With the realization that this was the natural course of things, the strategy at Apple included the notion that you shouldn’t give up just because an idea didn’t sell 15 million units of the first generation implementation. If it sold 100,000 and you found out what was good and what was not, and you could see the potential, then keep going.
When you seek to balance risk and research on the path to originality, it’s no easy feat. Many companies employ a management technique where with every project, they set up the boundary conditions, usually around cost and schedule, and there will also be technology conditions. But there is a problem if the development teams see these as hard boundaries. At Apple, we used to say to the team "it’s all right to play in this field; if you cross one of these boundaries, a red flag goes up and we just need to review it and understand it." This didn’t mean you couldn’t cross a boundary. You just need to know when you have crossed one.
More than risk mitigation, you need a program for risk support. If you are going to be design driven to create original products and services, your favorite new mantra needs to be: "Risk is not a four-letter word."
Think risk support rather than mitigation. You have to ask "What are the boundary conditions around that design that are going to break it if we keep trying to pull things out?" The risk here is you take the soul out of product. It takes a soft skill set, more of an art than a science, a sort of "just knowing" what it is that’s making that products great and where those boundaries are. And, of course, that’s what makes most left-brain business people more than a little nervous.
You need to allow the design people the freedom, at least initially, to explore nudging the boundaries and use design and the creative mind to do that. A general rule, when managing creative talent, is it’s a lot easier to rein people in than to get them to expand and run free as time goes on. Visualize the process as a funnel. You’re constantly narrowing down toward a solution. It should always be very wide open to possibilities at the beginning, and as you get further along, it is time to be very tight and focused. You keep it sort of broad and open at first, then narrow it down. As a business person, you are building a design-driven culture that’s organized around providing a superior experience to the end user. This means that your creative talent is managed within that context. There’ll also be testing; but that will always be in the same context: that of the customer experience and how they engage emotionally with your product or service.
The creative process is really hard to compress; it really is very difficult. You just need time to experiment and try things. Because when you get compressed, what you do is you revert to what you know.
One of the real challenges you have right now, that’s been growing in America and around the world, is time compression. If you’ve got a week to create something, you’re probably going to follow the things you know and can do and execute very well, as opposed to exploring breakthroughs if given the time and space. Now, the challenge in today’s global economy where time to market is a necessary obsession, is how do you allocate time and space? If there’s a market opportunity that needs to be fulfilled in nine months, and it takes eight months to engineer and tool something, then basically you’re giving your design team a month. And that happens more times than not. What to do?
You make haste slowly. You must allow time for research and development to happen in the design space. You have to. Even if it’s not part of the mainstream day-to-day "get it out in nine months project," you can move it outside and say here’s another project, this is a study, this is another ongoing long-term thing, and you’re going to give people the ability to spend time exploring, to do trial and error. It’s a really important quality of a design-driven culture, that as part of a project or on a parallel path, you give people the ability to experiment, to practice trial and error and have a few failures and learn from them and move on. Otherwise, you won’t move the bar ahead, you’ll just get stuck in the same rut.
Repeatable
In science, when you complete an experiment, nothing is proven until you can show that the results are repeatable. In business, that doesn’t mean imitating yourself. And in respect to being design driven, it takes on an even more charged and dynamic meaning: It means being able to do the same thing again, only differently.
Back to the iPhone again. The story is particularly remarkable when you consider how in six months it became the number-two smart phone (after the BlackBerry). Apple did this with a first-generation product. They didn’t use the same design path as the iPod, but they used the same creative approach, which is to focus on the customer experience and make a device people love. You ask how would you design this if the BlackBerry didn’t exist? As the product establishes its own market, it will continue to evolve, like the iPod, only different because the phone market is a different arena. Both benefited from the Apple culture. When you have built a design-driven culture, the design process can happen more rapidly. In a world where time to market is a make or break deal, not having a design-driven culture is a fatal flaw in this respect alone.
Many companies have come and gone. The reason for the departure of many was an inability to keep reinventing themselves. The concept applies in almost every category, and to further illustrate everything we’ve just talked about, why don’t we look at one more company that clearly "got it;" that is design driven from one end to the other.
If you’ve ever been in the kitchen section of any general merchandise store or specialty stores like Williams Sonoma, you have seen knives, peelers, can-openers, tea kettles, and any of a number of products with chubby soft black grips. The spongy handles also have flexible soft fins on the sides. These are Good Grip products and they are the brain child of OXO International, a company that began with a design idea.
Sam Farber’s wife Betsey was an architect who had arthritis in her hands so bad that being in the kitchen was no longer the joy it once was; it had become a difficult and frustrating experience. Sam had retired from being CEO of Copco, a cookware company he had founded in 1960 that was known for cookware products of colorful enameled cast iron with teak handles. The couple had rented a house in the South of France to focus on fun: cooking, entertaining, and their love of art. But when Sam saw Betsey struggling with culinary tools in the kitchen, he put his designer cap back on.
To Sam, it made no sense that anyone should have to suffer while doing the things that fulfill their passions. Why hadn’t anyone come up with an answer before for the 20 million Americans with arthritis. Gadgets came out all the time. Many had employed designs to look cosmetically appealing and were packaged to look great on the display racks in stores. But if you had arthritis, you couldn’t use them without pain. All Sam had to do was watch Betsey in the kitchen to realize she was having a bad experience that good design could end.
Images © OXO
An idea was now alive. Farber took his idea to a New York design firm he had worked with before; Smart Design. Think hard about Farber’s motivation for a bit. He wanted to do something meaningful. And authentic. This was a good idea because there were a lot of people like Betsey who were having increasingly painful experiences when working in the kitchen and trying to use basic culinary tools. It is also poignantly painful for family members to watch someone they love struggle to do the things they used to be able to do with easeful joy. Sam wanted to help as many people as possible, so one of his objectives was to keep the price points low, so the broadest possible group of arthritis sufferers could benefit. To give the designers a vested interest and to keep initial overhead costs low, Farber got Smart Design to put aside its usual fees in exchange for a 3 percent royalty and a small advance.
The design team took their research to the target customers, those who suffered from arthritis. They explored the manual limitations of a variety of people at different ages, looking for factors like declining strength that comes with aging. They considered wrist types, hand motions, and tasks like twisting, pulling, grating, peeling, and squeezing. As they worked, their passion grew until it matched Sam’s. The right incentives didn’t hurt either. They came up with models and tested them with real subjects until they arrived at an initial three categories of products: squeeze tools, measuring devices, and the gadgets and utensils (such as knives and peelers with the black multipurpose handles you now see so ubiquitously on the store shelves).
The real beauty in all this is that the OXO products are not just good for those with motor limitations, they are easier to use for everybody. They created an approach that was extensible, and could be repeated without loss of innovation. Then they figured out what their design gestalt was about and made sure everything had it. Now, the supply of Good Grips ideas seems endless. And each one carries equity from the others. It is a fantastic example of virtually all the aspects of "FLAVOR."
The products, as you already know, are a huge success. And, of course, there was the usual bevy of companies that slapped their foreheads and said, "Why didn’t we think of that?" Then they rushed to market with variations and darned-near outright copies. But true to the spirit of a design-driven company, OXO was already off to the races with soft-handled Good Grip tea kettles, jar openers, brushes, scrapers, and even easy-to-grip wooden spoons with widened handles. If that made competitors gasp, it wasn’t long before OXO had teamed up with the Sierra Club with a line of Good Grip garden tools. And, do you know what? OXO never let up. All you need to do is visit the company’s web site (http://www.oxo.com/oxoHome.jsp) to see countless other products that emerge each year to a loyal following that has led to ongoing growth in the face of all competitors.
The integrity of the idea and constantly spinning off fresh products from a pipeline always loaded with new offerings has fended off "knock-off" competitors and kept the original idea fresh and growing even after Farber sold OXO to the General Housewares Corporation in 1992, although he remained as the principal of the firm. Why was it such a success? Because the company was focused, had a long-term approach, was authentic, was vigilant, stayed original, and the design process was repeatable.
As you can see, what we have been talking about as a pathway to success starts with an idea about designing something new and fresh that solves an experiential and perhaps an (as yet) unrecognized need. Then your company gets designed around the fulfillment of your customers’ desire for a better experience. You can do it in increments, as a start-up, or by conversion, but when you’re finished, you need to be completely committed and keep all the aspects active and working.
If you do, and don’t slip, stumble, or lose your way, you will have a company that is resilient to change, that is stimulating to its employees and customers. If you do enough stuff right—take a few risks, make a few mistakes, keep learning and improving—you will find that you have become brilliant at using design to provide an amazing customer experience. Your customers will love you for it!