Thank you Jeremy. I must say that’s the most flattering introduction I’ve ever gotten, including one from my mother! Appreciate it.
Firstly, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always great to have any excuse to visit London for a couple of days and I’m also relieved to see that we have a lot more of the back of the classroom crowd here than the front of the classroom crowd. I hope that I’m not inappropriately casually dressed for this creative crowd.
So having said that, I’m here to talk about the only thing that I’m really qualified to talk about, OXO, the company that I run. Not to be confused with the OXO that you’re all familiar with, the bouillon cube. In a way I wished the founder of OXO didn’t named it OXO so we don’t have this confusion in the UK but having done that, let’s go to the history of the company, which is always a good place to start.
This gentleman’s name is Sam Farber. He spent 30 years in the houseware industry and started a company named Copco in the sixties, retired in the late eighties, sold a company, went to the South of France with his wife and did a lot of entertaining and cooking. Sam was approaching 70 at that time and his wife Betsy had slight arthritis in her hand and between the two of them and all the cooking they were doing, they realised that there were very few comfortable cooking utensils that they could find in the market and Sam being the ultimate entrepreneur decided to come out of retirement to start a company to make these products. And understanding marketing, he also realised that he shouldn’t be designing products specifically to a narrow sliver of people with special needs but to make product for the wide spectrum of user as possible. So he went to a…erm…actually, you know…if you look at this item, at that time of one the most common items that hurt your hand was a peeler and it’s hard to imagine that in the short 15 years that this item is not as familiar now as it was then. Everybody had one of these in their drawers, everybody just accepted that peeling a potato or any vegetable is an unpleasant test, that’s it, you know, Grandmother had left the peeler and they’d been using it for a hundred years. Sam went to Smart Design – a firm that he used in New York – to study how to make utensils that are comfortable not only for the elderly and people with dexterity problems but for everybody.
So, Smart went to work and as you see start studying a whole lot of different forms on the first products and they also invite on board a design consultant called Patricia Moore who specialises in designing products for the elderly and came up with the first product which is a peeler. This has become somewhat of an iconic product for the OXO line. A peeler is one of those things – if you look at this one it’s got a straight blade – but it’s very culturally driven, some countries use one with a straight blade like that, some with a horizontal blade, a wide peeler which is what you see in this country more and the sales are usually ten to one, depending on the country you’re in.
I think, before I go on, it’d be good for me to define what at least OXO mean by universal design or what you call inclusive design here, because we see a lot of different definition. The founding of OXO coincided in similar timing with the beginning of the movement of universal design.
And to us, universal design really means designing products that are comfortable and easy to use for the largest spectrum of users as possible. It doesn’t mean designing for a specific group. So if look at this chart, on the X-axis is the ability of the people and on the Y-axis is the population of the group. So, you know, over here are these very capable people – they can do anything, with anything, they could survive in the wilderness for weeks on end with nothing – and on this side are severely disabled people, paraplegics, quadriplegics. Most product in the market at that time, and still now, are easily and comfortably usable by this group of the population and this stuff is a little difficult for this group to use. From OXO’s perspective universal design simply means expanding the usability of those products to a much wider audience. Recognising that in this sliver there are users that our product cannot address, erm, we can’t design products specifically for this group without making the product a) more expensive perhaps for the rest of the group, but worse than that, less user friendly for the rest of the population. So in OXO’s case, we actually licensed some of our handle design to a company called North Coast Medical that put in different implements in the heads specifically for that group of audience – for example, utensils like forks and spoons that you can bend to a certain shape, button hooks that help people button their shirts, those are not products that regular users use.
This may be a very familiar example for those of you who are involved in this movement but this is a doorknob, it’s very traditional and quite pretty in some people’s eyes, it’s not the easiest thing to open the door if you have a stiff door, or even for a perfectly healthy capable person if you have lotion in your hand with a stiff door, it’s very hard to turn that doorknob. On other hand, with a lever, you can open that door with a lever, even if you don’t have any hands, you can lean into the door and there are a bunch of various different ways to do it. That is a perfect example of what a universally designed product is. It’s a product that is designed without sacrificing cost or appearance or aesthetics and it’s helping users do things that they couldn’t otherwise do without letting them know that they’re being helped – so it’s a kind of a stealth product if you will - and that is really important in terms of kind of mass appeal of these products.
Now, if you look at the census of the population in the United States, starting in 1960 – which is a particularly relevant year for me because that was the year I was born – and you can see that the largest slice of the population was the newborns. And as we move closer to today you can see how the population changes, it’s just growing in general and, right now the largest slice of the population is between 40 and 55 in the United States and a lot of the Baby Boomers are turning 60 and this is big news for the US, all the companies are now talking about the Baby Boomers turning 60 and I’m getting more phone calls than ever from Business Magazine because people are realising that the biggest population are getting older. The good news is that this generation of 60 year olds is very different from the 60 year olds from a couple of generations ago – these are the 60 year olds that are riding motorcycles and are doing…jumping out of aeroplanes and all kinds of different activities – this is the last group of people that would want a geriatric product in their kitchen, they want products that cool, young people like you guys use and they don’t want to differentiate themselves as the older crowd. And more importantly, if you look at this, as we grow in the last 20 years the entire population is growing, it’s not just the so-called older generation. So it’s extra important to design products that are useable by this entire population.
I know I’m coming here, so it’s important to take a look at the UK numbers. You guys are a young bunch, I guess you waited a long time after the Second World War to have babies so you’re ten years younger probably or more, but even here it’s happening, you can see as we go to in next twenty years the biggest population group is between 55 and 70 and you know, the rest of them, the population is growing as well, so it’s critically important.
Now what does that universal design do for us as a company? Designing product for a wide spectrum of people? This has been our growth in the last 15 years and we’ve been very fortunate to have a good product to a large spectrum of people that appreciate the features. I think some people buy our product because they liked the way it looked and the people we get the most fan mails and letters from are actually the older generation, a) because they have more time to write and b) because they feel the most difference within the products.
This is a quick one to show you the structure of the company and we had intentionally over time keep the size of the company very small, we want OXO to be a very virtual company, because we wanted to keep it entrepreneurial and creative and if we were to do everything ourselves, it would be a three or four hundred people company and the dynamic of the company would change very dramatically. So in the middle of it we have the OXO office, which is about 50 employees in New York, in Manhattan. For those of you who know New York we’re in the meat-packing district – it sounds like a funny name but it’s actually one of the hottest neighbourhoods right now, there are a lot of clubs and restaurants in there – and these 50 people actually manage a lot of outside resources. For one, we don’t own any factories. Some of the older US companies are really struggling with the fact that they are really a manufacturing driven company because then they are tied to a specific type of product a specific type of material that their factory produce. In our case, we can actually make all kinds of products for all kinds of categories and OXO’s goal is actually not to be the best utensil company out there but to take this universal design philosophy and apply it to as many categories as feasible within the household. So having this flexibility to work with all kinds of factories and resources is very helpful to us.
Logistics – even though we use our parent company, Logistics and Warehouse Systems, we look at them as outside piece we treat them as outside piece because we can always move to an outside piece if it becomes more efficient to do so.
Even in retail, we only have three or four sales managers in this office in New York, and they manage over a hundred different sales rep organisations to deal with the retail partners, but obviously kind of retaining all the knowledge and information within our company.
I think most interestingly to this crowd, as design driven as OXO is as a company, we don’t have any internal industrial design department. We work almost exclusively with external firms. We started with one firm, Smart Design and we now work with nine different design firms, including two in Japan that are designing specifically for the Japanese market.
These firms are actually investing their time and the money in developing OXO products in exchange for royalty down stream so they really have real interest in designing products that are not winning awards only but actually selling and more importantly selling for a long period of time, not faddish item if you will. It takes Oxo a couple of years, or a couple of rounds of development with each firm for them to truly be up to speed and know who OXO is. I’ve often gone to business schools when they teach an OXO case and students often ask, ‘all these design firms design your products, who really owns the core competency of your company?’ The fact is that for the first couple of years with these firms we really hold their hands closely to guide them to what an OXO product is or what it is not and all these pieces are tied together with OXOin the middle without that, it really wouldn’t be a business.
So, I’ll talk more about the attributes of OXO products in a minute but this is a portfolio matrix that we looked at active projects at OXO. We have 260 current projects in the hopper and we look at the complexity of changes in design or in manufacturing processes and on this end is a marketing complexity. So for example, an item down here is other utensils that we’ve made before, we know exactly how to make it, we know what the pitfalls are, and we’re going to sell it to exactly the same channels that we’ve been selling to all along. The products out here are products in new categories, in materials that we’ve never used before and selling to channels and retailers that we’ve never sold to before.
So, we keep this just to have a good pictorial on where risk and reward is. We want this portfolio to be very diverse and to have products all over the place. If we have too many products over here it’s too risky a-situation, if we have too many products over here, we’re not taking enough of a risk to really build our business and build our brand, so this is kind of an interesting way to look at it product planning.
Now when we meet new firms, there’s often a thousand questions about what is an OXO product and what’s not and to the best of our ability we kind of condense them to a few statements here.
User focused – people talk about user centred design a lot and I think there’s, unfortunately, a lot more people talking about it than there are people doing it – so the research centre here is doing great justice for that type of statement.
Latent user needs are, as you know, often the most valuable ones because people have accepted certain short-comings for certain tasks, they hate it but they can’t really articulate it, because they’ve accepted it. So, being able to draw that out, usually you have a really great success when you solve those problems.
Flexible in addressing different user needs. It’s also important, of you give a product to five different users they’re probably going to use it four different ways. My favourite example is probably the original Apple PowerBook with the ball in the middle, and that was designed originally so that you can manipulate the ball with one thumb and push the button with the other and never having your fingers to leave the keyboards. But if you watch people using it almost nobody uses it like that; people are taking their hands off, using their index fingers to roll the ball. The point is you can never really design and dictate how the user is going to use the product. You need to design and address the different styles that people have and that’s part of ergonomic design if you will.
Function – it’s clear in our case we want to make sure that we have tangible improvements over existing products for every product we make. All the rest is…any good company will tell you, it’s comfortable, it’s durable, it’s clean, easy to understand so on and so forth.
A lot of companies ask us ‘what does an OXO product look like?’ and even though some people may think that they have a very distinct look our only criteria really is it has to have an honest aesthetics, it should be utilitarian and honest. If it’s a peeler it should look like a peeler not some device where people have to ask what this is. It should take a six-page pamphlet to work out how to use it. And thought provoking is actually quite interesting. If you’re introducing new functions and solving a problem in a business like ours where it’s a push business – meaning that it’s not advertising driven it’s its presence in the store – you need to grab people’s attention when they walk by the product and people ought to be able to see ‘ah, this is doing something different, what is it?’ and hopefully figure it out themselves, the function and the benefits and that’s the moment that they actually have the recognition and they buy it. I can give you a few more examples later.
Non-trend based. We specifically didn’t want to get into fashion aesthetics because we want our products to sell for 10/15 years after we put all the investments into it.
Just a few kind of advice for companies who are not, you know, into kind of creating, taking risk…innovation where everybody has put a lot of focus in recent years is a risky business. You have to accept a certain amount of portfolio to fail or never come out or never reach that target and you have to create an environment in your company that accepts that and that encourages people to take chances, calculated chances, but chances, and don’t get punished when those projects don’t succeed. And that’s a delicate balance – we’re not suggesting a free for all mentality where there’s no consequence for failure but that behave is cultivated, it’s not natural for people to stick their neck out especially in big organisations.
Let me show you some images of product development at OXO. If you look at a product development process chart from OXO, it’s all very standard it’s the same looking thing as every company out there. It’s really the culture of the people that drives that attention to detail and always looking for problems. We’re actually a very cynical bunch because we’re always looking for problems and not only in other people’s product but in our own products as well.
And we believe that identifying the problems and asking the right questions is 70% of the challenge. After you’ve laid out the question and identified the problems, finding the solutions most of the time are relatively easy. So we start by looking at the product we’re making and competitive products and briefing the design firm and marketing brief and go to user research very quickly, with us and the design firm both. With different age groups – we have to look at young and old – different environments, how they store the products, how they use it, people with kids, people without, young professionals, you have to look at the kitchens and if we’re designing a lot of large handled ergonomic products how are they going to store it? What does their kitchen look like?
And most importantly, people think of user research as these things big companies do, like a Unilever spending $300,000 on user research, it doesn’t have to be that at all, it’s just building the habit and the culture of paying attention to user needs.
This is a photograph of some user input sessions at the lobby of the building where OXO’s office is. We happen to be in a building called Chelsea Market, there is 22 or 23 high-end food retailers there, and they have retail shops for the general public and it’s a really creative environment, a lot of people walk in and out there. We go down there, in the lobby, we put a table down we put a sign up – this sign here – that says ‘Give us a few minutes of your time and get a free OXO product’. Now, people love free gifts, people also love to tell you what to think so those two combinations are great. You see this line going out the door - and it’s practically free to us. And yes, I know that New York crowds are a little bit weird and you can’t really rely all your research on New York crowds just like I’m sure you can in London either and you’ve got to supplement it by getting information from different parts of the country or, in some cases, different parts of the world, but most of the time they’re not that far off and this information is free and it takes us an hour, two hours to do so every company can do this. The other thing that’s important is that if you’re testing products use the real environment and use the real material. This is our engineer’s is looking at a wine pourer, and er, use wine, don’t use water. There are differences in viscosity and of course this engineer’s trying to look very serious but of course they’re very happy that we’re using the real material in this case!
Real users, I remember that there was a case where we were testing a brooms – a cleaning product that was coming up - and you know, we had this thesis that most of the broom handles we found on the market were too short, people are hunching over and were not using it properly and we put a sign on the door of the design firm to say ‘Come up, give us five minutes of your time for – I don’t remember - $5 or $10’ – something like that. Some people show up and we’d videotape them and one of the women was sweeping the floor and was bending over with our prototype, you know, which has a very long handle. And we asked her after the fact, ‘why are you doing that?’ and she said, ‘oh, I didn’t think of that, I guess my broom at home is really short so I’m just used to that posture’ and which taught us a lesson that not only do you have to provided them with something that they can use more easily but you have to give them the clue of where they hold it and how they use it. It’s not an automatic response after they’ve gotten used to certain things.
Now these are researching garden tools, we’re in Manhattan so you’ve got to go outside. Go to New Jersey – the Garden State – or wherever you can find gardening. Now this is another interesting one, we’re testing product for Japanese products and in the beginning we were basically just trying to ship US developed products to Japan and the common keep coming back it’s too big, the product’s too big, make them smaller so we’d make them smaller and they’d no, not small enough, make them smaller and we’re thinking, ‘OK, I don’t understand that’. Ergonomically, if you look at the human factor chart maybe they’re 5% smaller as a general population but not 30% smaller and their apartment is small, in general, even the houses are small but not that much smaller. Then we started to do some research and we realised that, in the Western culture, if you take a spatula that you’re cooking with or a turner in some countries I think you call them, most of us are hold that spatula like a tennis racket, cooking like this. In Japan they never hold anything like a tennis racket, but whether they’re stirring or flipping or sautéing they hold it like a pen, and there lies the difference. Obviously a handle that is designed to be held like this is going to be way too big to be held like a pen so these are the things that you only get when you dig into it and observe it. And you’ve got to look at different levels of homes, high-income homes, low-income homes, entire demographics that you’re shooting after.
Here’s an example – a pretty old one actually 1997 – of a development of now one of the most popular OXO products a salad spinner where I’ll walk you very quickly through the process. We take all existing products on the market and look at it including, in this case, inspiration of ours which is the little toy there, and in this case we tested the RPM of the spinner and see what’s the maximum RPM of the spinners on the market. Then we went into a kind of styling stage, not so much, well, partly to see what we wanted the thing to look like but a lot to do with, you know, the size of how large it has to be to be comfortable, whether it pinches your finger and all the rest, and we do internal, as well as external research on – or survey rather – on the reception of those forms. We go into 3D filing; now it’s very standard practice, then was still a little new, and then we went to the prototype stage.
It was interesting that when we went to this stage at that time the only two salad spinners on the market was the kind you pull on a string – just like a yoyo – so when it comes to the end of the string it stops. And if you’re not very coordinated, often you’re left with the string out and you’ve got to take the string out and rewind it or put the string back in or if it’d going really fast and you let go of the string it will whack you on the head. But when the string comes to the end it stops and the other type of salad spinner is the type you crank with your hand and when you stop cranking the salad spinner stops. Well, when we got this prototype, when we were using it and we were pumping it, it was going really fast and only then did we realise that this thing doesn’t stop, it keeps going, you open the lid and the salad’s just flying out of the thing. So we said, ‘oh, we’ve got to add a brake, we must put a brake in here’ and we discussed how to add the brake and there are all kinds of ways you can put it, when you put the plunger down it will stop and all of that, but we decided that we wanted to make it a very obvious secondary tool to give the user control over this, because users like control over the task they’re doing and it turned out to be a feature that the people talked about, it’s like, ‘wow, this thing even has a brake’. They didn’t talk about any of the other salad spinners needing a brake; they just said this one has a special feature, a brake. So that’s an interesting lesson. So this was the finished product with a stow-away plunger.
A few other examples of successful and not-so successful OXO products that I want to share with you. This is a tea kettle that we launched five or six years ago and if you watch a lot of American movies and TV shows you’ll see this kettle showing up a lot, it’s become kind of the most successful tea kettle in the US in a long time.
This is some of those thought-provoking aesthetics that I’ve been talking about. The problem we tried to solve is place the handle back, away from the heat, a comfortable handle obviously, and in the angle where it’s easy to life the weight of the pot, as well as to tilt the pot, you know, having a large enough knob so that you can squeeze and open the lid without a lot of stress. And that when you tilt, when you’re holding a heavy pot of water, especially if you’ve got dexterity problems in your hands you don’t want to have to be fumbling to open the whistle lid as well, this kettle actually opens the lid itself when you tilt the kettle to pour. And you know there’s something happening here that if you walk by you’ve never seen before and say ‘OK, there’s something happening there, I know it’s a kettle, what does it do?’ and it invites you to grab it and play with it and when it clicks open you have this ‘aha’ moment, I’ve seen people do it in the store and that’s when they buy and it that’s an example.
This is another. This is an angle measuring cup or what you’d call an angle-measuring jug here. And this idea came to us from a couple of toy designers, and then we went to…we liked it immediately but we did some research and we asked people, ‘tell us the problems you have with your measuring cups’, and they said, ‘yeah, mine is glass and if it drops to the floor it breaks and it gets a little greasy sometimes and it’s hard to hold especially when it comes out of microwaves’ so on and so forth and it went on for a bunch of different problems. Then we said, ‘OK, show us how you use the measuring cup’. So they put the measuring cup on the kitchen counter, they didn’t want to hold it up because they wanted to make sure it’s balanced, they put it on the kitchen counter, they our some liquid on it, bend down, pour some more, bend down, look at it again, pour some out, this goes on four or five times. And we said, ‘what’s the problem’ and they said, ‘what problem?’ So it’s obviously very inefficient but nobody looks at it as a problem, so we decided to go with this product which has basically a ramp up the side so you can see it clearly in the kitchen counter height, when you pour liquid it just goes up this line and it hits the measurement it stops. It’s one of those really easy products that people think, ‘how come nobody’s made that before?’ We sold 2.6 million pieces of this in the first year we launched it.
And I was worried whether people were going to understand this product at all, until I had lunch with a sister of a translator from Japan who doesn’t speak English at all who and she was, through her sister, telling me how excited she was to see this product in Bed, Bath and Beyond – a store in the US – and she didn’t read English at all so she got it with no language at all so we were pleased with that.
Here’s an example of a very whole-home product. We were designing cooking tongs and the design firm was going all different directions of new fandangle cooking tongs and we said, ‘wait a minute, French chef’s have been using these tongs for a long time, the work well, why are we re-inventing the wheel?’ and after some discussion we finally came up with this product with some non-slip pad on the side, we left the front open because people rested it on frying pans and put a large knob on it so you can lock the tong so that they don’t open in your drawer, and this has become a very standard tongs now, if you look at them. A year later, the New York Times has tested and ranked all the tongs and ranked this as by far the best cooking tongs on the market but everything that they mentioned about this has to do with the details of how easy it is to open, the spring tension, how the front needs…nothing to do with innovation at all. So the point I’m tying to demonstrate here is that design is not often about revolution, it’s just evolution, little, little improvements that you pay attention to, it’s not always about this you know, ‘wow!’ invention.
Now I’m going to share with you quickly about a couple of failures that we have. This thing is called a bagel, may be some of you know it, may be some of you don’t. It’s become very popular in the United States in the last ten years or so. And New York, where we live, is the bagel capital of the world. So, when we checked the emergency room, the most common occurrence of injury was people cutting themselves while cutting a bagel – like this – there was already some bagel holder on the market but some of the people going to the emergency room cut themselves while using the bagel holder. So we decided that we wanted to so a bagel holder with a handle completely away from the knife, that holds all different sizes of bagel. So we went to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, all different size bagel, we decided this was the range of size we could accommodate, we make this thing, we test it, it works well, we’re excited. We went to Chicago houseware show in January to launch this thing. We said, ‘OK, we need some props’, so we went to the supermarket and the bagels were like this big, we’d never seen a bagel like that – it was like a child-size bagel – of course it doesn’t work in this. So we hold the launch, we didn’t launch the thing. We had sales reps all over the country send bagels to us, bagel galore! The range turns out to be much bigger and we fixed the problems six months later to accommodate the range but because we never set out to accommodate the range, the product was really not as good as it should have been. And even though it sells, we pull it off the market six months later because we really didn’t want a bad product out there, once we started getting feedback that it’s not doing a great job.
Here’s another problem. Problems people have so-called ‘travelling’ coffee mug. With a travelling coffee mug, almost all of them leak, so you really can’t put it in your bag, if it tilts over in your car it’s really frustrating. So we set out to design a travel mug that doesn’t leak at all, totally waterproof, you can knock it over and it’s fine. Ergonomically, we also wanted a lever there so when you drink you can access the coffee one handed. One little problem that we forget to think about that when you achieve a totally sealed cup with hot liquid inside it the pressure slowly built. The first sample we got, we put hot water in it, we squeezed, it cleared half way across the room, right, this was at a time when MacDonald’s was being sued for hot coffee so we weren’t going to launch this thing. And we went and spin our wheels and let the pressure out before you let the water out and all that, about two years later we dumped this idea altogether. Eventually we made this product, it has a single push button on the top, you basically push it once, drink it and put it down, push it because we didn’t think that people were going to push it in this position, so this tried out to be, thankfully, a really successful product, we’re in our third year now and it’s one of the biggest products we have.
Quickly, similar problem we have, I don’t want to get into the story… problem, you can’t see an oven thermometer when you put in, the lights behind, you can’t see that, so put a piece of glass behind so it’s illuminated from the back, so you can see it. People, especially they leave in the meat thermometer, you take it out of the oven, full of grease, you put it in the water, wash it, the air shrinks inside, sucks all the water in, so now you have the thing half full of water. So we said, ‘OK, solve that problem, seal it’ we should have learned our sealing lesson already!
Seal the thing so it doesn’t happen, sealed the thing; we tested the range of the temperature of the oven. First batch we shipped one week before Thanksgiving which, you know, most of these ovens are used in Thanksgiving in the United States because of the turkey. These things start exploding in the oven. And we recalled it very quickly but you know, another lesson learned on the assumption. I’ve got a lot of those and thankfully these days it’s less and less because we now have, you know, we’ve learned these lessons.
Remember the salad spinners? We made a smaller one for Japan – very successful there – it turns out that it’s very successful in the US as well. For every three of these, we sell one of these, I don’t know why but we do. So when we first launched this thing, we got a user test and this is the footage of the first couple of users we tested this with:
Jacques Pepin: “ Very often actually we keep the heart of the salad to be served in a different way in fact may be I’ll keep this one so we can use it may be some other way.”
Julia Child: “ During the tens and the twenties people didn’t eat salad I think, only sissies ate salad, or French people, wasn’t it?”
Jacques Pepin: “ So you mix it gently in there, the sign that it’s full to the bottom, then you have to lift it up gently from the water, because if you put it into a colander every dirt goes back into the salad. In addition, people will take the salad and kind of squeeze it but you cannot there, it gets wilted, you know, so gently you have to grab it out of the water, now there is some fan in the bottom here, this of course is the bottom of my spinner. If you put it there, isn’t that great?”
Julia Child: “This is a very modern spinner”
Jacques Pepin: “You really remove everything, here and this, and you do this very fast here, and then there’s a break here, isn’t that great? So here you can see that that salad is really dry. You can also see out of that salad, I’ve removed like, four or five tablespoons of water, if you don’t do it properly then that is going to dilute your dressing and your salad is dead”.
So, those of you who don’t know, that’s Jacques Pepin and Julia Child the most famous chef’s in the US, and the shock was that Jacque was in his early sixties then and Julia was in her eighties, and actually Julia passed away about a year and half after that, erm, that filming. So, you know, universal design didn’t accommodate that but it was an epiphany when I went home about a year and a half ago and I saw my two and a half year old daughter using the salad spinner in her own unique way.
FILM: Video of Alex Lee’s daughter using the salad spinner.
So that’s all I have for you today, and erm, I’m pleased to be here. I’m happy to take some questions if we still have time.
Jeremy Myerson: “ Thank you very much Alex, absolutely, er, very entertaining and comprehensive survey.”
Questions
Delegate: “You mentioned that one of your goals of OXO was to design for the widest audience, and I’ve seen, and I’m sure you know, that a lot of your products are very easy to copy, so I wondered what your approach was to either defending or just carrying on inventing?”
Alex Lee: “ Well, I mean in the beginning we were very concerned about that and kind of looking behind us all the time and we filed patents then and now whenever we can, utility patents and sometimes design patents. Fortunately, I think the market when we first came out, kind of looked at us as a very niche, crazy business and nobody really reacted until we were quite established. At least in the United States that’s the case, and you know, we’re really just looking forward and running just as fast as we can, because the challenges is that if you become kind of known as the innovative company who’s also going to come up with the next 50 items and you’ve got 800 items in your assortment that are selling really well at a high price point, it becomes much harder for a knock-off company to come in and say ‘hey, we’ve got 50 items to sell you at a lower cost’.
These retailers don’t want an item at a lower cost if the high-cost item sells and they also know that if they switch from us to someone else, it’s only going to be good for a year because that other company is not going to come up with the next new 50 fun items for the…so, that’s the best way we have to defend ourselves.”
Delegate: “The question I want to ask was of your employees, your 50 employees, how are they broken down? And how would you get to the situation where you decide we want to design a salad spinner with a break?”
Alex Lee: “ With the brake part, as I said, it was kind of after product, but how to design a product salad spinner is a very valid question. With the 50 employees, I would say that more than half or three fifths of them are focusing on product development, not so much designing, but managing product development. So we have product managers, category directors, that are looking at strategically a category, which should we be in, which we should not and then they do the product planning and then they work with the…in their teams are product managers and engineers who doesn’t work as really a design engineer in this case but the liaison between the design firm’s engineer and the factories and our engineers hold the knowledge of how these manufacturers work and other than that, you know, we have sales, sales people in the office, we have accounting, and er, marketing is part of a shared function basically between sales and product management and the road and we do graphic design in-house because it’s just more cost efficient to do that. In terms of deciding which product is…there sort of really no magic formula, you’ve got to look at what products are out there, what are the important products that are out there, and which product has the most leeway for improvement? We tend to have been very successful in the whole-home categories if you will that people have forgotten and say OK, these things are just whole-home and people don’t want to go after it but the fact is that if you have 50% of the whole-home market it’s a very big market. So it’s kind of a both the total sales of that category of product and the chance of improvement is really what drives is there.”