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

November 24, 2003

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.

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.

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