A New Soap Star (for the Kitchen)
Grab the bottle, tip the bottle, pour the soap. For half a century that was the undisturbed routine of using liquid dish detergent--until designer Karim Rashid got his hands on it and turned it upside-down. Or maybe that’s right side up.
Rashid’s brave new 10-inch bottle for a Northern California-based company called Method Home doesn’t have an opening on top with the kind of push-pull closure that every other kind of dish soap seems to have. Instead it has a smooth, bulbous head, nipped waist and conical body that, when squeezed, dispenses soap from the bottom.
The prolific half-English, half-Egyptian Rashid is the industrial design world’s reigning “it” man, who’s confident he can turn a soap bottle into a design icon.
“I always thought that innovation could be on the high end as well as the low end,” the 42-year-old Rashid says from his New York studio. His previous works include the curvy Garbo trash can, Con Edison manhole covers, Issey Miyake fragrance and toiletry bottles, and polypropylene bowls for housewares company Umbra. Rashid’s hefty monograph “I Want to Change the World” (Universe) came out earlier this year. “At the same time I was contacted to do [the soap bottle] I was also asked to do a wine bottle and milk container for other companies,” he says, “so it’s interesting that it’s part of the zeitgeist that these things are becoming a more important part of life, and they need to be rethought and redesigned. I’ve spent my life going to malls and places like Kmart, and you look at the amount of tooling and investment and research and development that goes into products, and you think, why can’t the landscape have more beautiful things? It could all be different tomorrow.”
Target is testing the soap (available in citrusy mandarin, lavender, mint and cucumber fragrances) in its Chicago and San Francisco stores, but a spokesman declined to release sales figures. The Ralphs grocery store chain is reviewing the product, although stores have been carrying Method’s cleaning sprays since early this year. For the last few weeks it’s been on shelves at the Terence Conran Shop in New York, an upscale modern home furnishings store where buyer David Branham says he had to reorder the soap four days after the initial 200 bottles hit the shelves: “My first response when I heard about it,” he says, “was that someone is going to have to do something pretty revolutionary in order to get people to stop and think anew about dish soap. Nobody thinks about it. You’d have to do something really extraordinary to shake it up, and I think this has done it.”
Method Home may be the only dish soap on which the designer is credited with “bottle design.” The shape resembles a blown-up version of Rashid’s pawn piece from his rubbery translucent plastic chess set released last year. Rashid says he nicknamed his creation the “dish butler” because “he sits proudly on your counter. It’s the antithesis of the ‘50s archetype of all those cleaning products because instead of [turning it upside-down] you grab it and squeeze it, and that’s the beauty of what design can do. It seemed kind of obvious, and I wonder why it hasn’t been done before. With the old way you get all the crud on the top and it looks terrible. So I think it turned out really well.”
Although the designer has his share of detractors--some call his work shallow, derivative and unimaginative--few would disagree that his aggressive self-and mass-marketing tactics have helped push industrial design and designers into the spotlight. He’s not alone--Michael Graves and Philippe Starck (and preceding them, Henry Dreyfuss)--are among those who’ve made household items such as toasters, chairs and dishes available to the masses via national retailers. They’ve all helped propel a changing attitude among consumers, manufacturers and retailers so that products as lowly as dish soap should have a chance at being stylish.
Redesigning the World
What Rashid may lack in modesty he makes up for in unchecked enthusiasm for his work and his single-minded determination to redesign the world, which, in his opinion, desperately needs an aesthetic realignment. That and his dedication to designing inexpensive, mass-produced products are what prompted the founders of Method Home to e-mail him cold about a year ago and ask him to help create their new line of dish soap. He has since been named the company’s chief creative officer, and there are plans for more Rashid products.
“Karim has such a strong understanding of how to make little objects with almost effortless design,” says 29-year-old Eric Ryan, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Pacific Heights-based Method Home. “We told him this would be an opportunity to reinvent a ‘50s icon, a dish soap container that sits on every kitchen sink across America. There’s a trend away from basin washing to doing one pot at a time. So before you’d use the dish soap once a day, and now we’re using it 10 to 15 times.”
Rashid, who says he gets project requests at the rate of “a couple a day,” approached the offer with a wary eye, having been burned by enthusiastic start-ups with flimsy financial backing. “But what intrigued me about Method’s e-mail,” Rashid adds, “was that they’re interested in products that are accessible, that elevate some level of our experience, and I’m obsessed with that kind of stuff. I also like the fact that the products are eco-friendly.”
A Track Record
It also helped that Ryan and 28-year-old Adam Lowry, the company’s co-founder and vice president of product development, had established a track record for Method, founded in 1999. Their original product line, currently in 2,000 stores nationwide, consists of spray cleaners for kitchen, glass, bath, shower and other areas of the home, packaged in clear spray trigger bottles distinguished by their scents (lavender, bamboo, ylang ylang, cucumber and coral) and their labels, which use contemporary color photographs. Although Method’s packaging puts it with a new breed of high-end boutique cleaners such as Caldrea and Good Home Co. that offer aromatherapy fragrances, milder solutions and sophisticated design, Method’s prices are only a smidgen above supermarket rates. The dish soap will retail from $4 to $5 for 25 ounces.
Ryan and Lowry gave Rashid little guidance other than asking him to create a shape that could be affordably produced. “We like to keep things open with designers,” says Ryan. “He’s a brilliant man, he spends over 200 days a year traveling; he’s so wired in to movements within society, so we had full faith in him.”
Before the ink dried on the contract, Rashid was already taking pencil to sketch pad and furiously drawing away: “My approach is that the minute someone mentions a project to me, I go crazy. I have to slap myself and say, ‘Wait until you have the contract!’ But I’m already designing it. I work like a maniac, and I have a tendency to do way too much.”
He sketched some 40 designs, narrowed them down to 12 and handed them off to his staff, which made them into 3-D models on a computer. About a month after the designer put pen to paper, those ideas were delivered to Method.
Rashid says the likeness to his chess piece is “incidental. The form for the bottle came out of holding the soap, and since the bottom is the flat part, the top can be perfectly round....With a rounded head and narrow body, it won’t slip out of your hand.”
Ryan and Lowry chose it “because it was the most different dish soap out there.” They soon discovered, however, that the design had a “degree difficulty of 10,” according to Ryan, “for, among other things, custom engineering the bottom self-closing valve so that soap doesn’t drip onto the counter, finding a way to attach the clear plastic “skirt” at the bottom to the rest of the bottle, and making sure the plastic used was rigid enough to stand up but pliable enough to be squeezed.
A David Among Goliaths
Although Method has developed an impressive track record for its short time in the market, it is still a David next to Goliaths such as Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble, which take up prime real estate on store shelves.
“A small company will often look to designers who can give their product a very high-profile, quality look right off the bat so they don’t get left in the dust,” says Kiphra Nichols, head of the industrial design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. “It’s an important strategy, especially if the designer has a track record. Retailers are savvy, and they know these designers.”
Whatever Rashid has done to raise the profile of industrial designers, he’s done it at the right time. This is the “golden age of industrial design,” says Martin Smith, chairman of the product design department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “In the past it was more about the engineering of a product, how it functioned. But now, with almost all products, if you remove the cover, they’re all pretty much the same thing, only the design is different. The contribution the designer makes has become recognized in business schools. It’s an integral part of a business strategy, which in turn has produced more recognition and more work for designers.”
It’s also produced a generation of young consumers who are not just tuned into cutting-edge design, they expect it--from their MP3 players to their laptops to their sneakers.
“I think design in this country has become a really public subject,” says Rashid. “There’s more of an appreciation for what we do. But the [industrial] designer has kind of been abused and taken advantage of in the last 50 years.... The designer is kind of like the conductor of the orchestra, and the bass player is the engineer and the violins are marketing, and you have to convince them all of your ideas.”
Clearly, he’s not daunted by the task: “Today, dish soap,” he says, “tomorrow, the entire house!”
