Let's start method's 8th year birthday celebration (happening in August) early, what do you say? How about an article from 2004 (via The New York Times!) Here you go!"The Way We Live Now
By Rob Walker
If you have never given much thought to the aesthetic qualities of your dish soap, you are not alone. What's a little more surprising is that a person who has given a lot of thought to this subject would not be alone, either. Two people in this category are Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry.
Who cares, right? It's dish soap, for crying out loud -- it gets stuffed under the sink between the rusty Brillo pads and the boric acid.
That defeatist attitude is exactly what Ryan and Lowry set out to change. Ryan, who is 31 and a former marketer who had done work for the Gap, Saturn and other brands, was appalled at the mundane state of home-care products in general. We obviously take a great interest in the places we live, he says, and yet, "When you walk down the aisle dedicated to products to take care of your home, it's one of the most low-interest categories in the world."
True enough, and perhaps a powerful cue to toss a Palmolive in the shopping cart and get on with your life, but Ryan saw an opportunity. What if you could do something different with home-care products? Soon he was working with his friend Lowry, 29, a chemical engineer, creating sprays and soaps that were environmentally safe, smelled good and -- crucially -- came in packaging that looked so striking it practically demanded to be left out in the open. Before making the leap to national stores, they brought in the celebrated designer Karim Rashid, who among other things had created a hit trash can sold at Target. Rashid came up with a design for a dish-soap container that squirts from the bottom through a clever nonleaking spout. Clear, filled with different, colorful soaps and shaped like an hourglass, the bottle looks like a sculpture and won a design-distinction award from the magazine I.D. It also looks disconcertingly large, underscoring its status as a proud object to be admired, not shamefully hidden away.
Form preceded function. "Design is a fast way to make these products more high interest," Ryan says, to the target audience of "progressive domestics." Environmental safety was "a goal," one that he still sounds almost surprised to have achieved. But form is what really sells some $10 million of the stuff annually. Much of the feedback from enthusiastic customers boils down to: "I kind of thought it wouldn't work, but at least I'll have this cool container left over. Then I got it home and used it, and I'm shocked at how well it actually works."
One reaction to this is to wonder why somebody would buy a cleaning product that they were frankly skeptical about simply because of its container. Perhaps this is more evidence of the endless craving for status symbols, or of how cunning design seduces and manipulates us. But those explanations seem too easy. Virginia Postrel, an economics writer, does not address Method specifically in her recent book "The Substance of Style," but her thesis provides useful context. Praising aesthetic pleasure as a legitimate value, she observes that the more we see style, the more we recognize it and want it in our lives. Ugliness stands out, she writes, so "we demand better design." Later she asserts, "Aesthetic proliferation gives us more choices, opportunities and responsibility than ever before."
It's the responsibility bit that gives you pause. Method products raise the possibility that, stylistically speaking, your dish liquid is not measuring up. Which is, frankly, annoying: must even the most mundane household object rise up and join the tyranny of Good Design? Ryan seems puzzled by this line of questioning. "It just makes you get enjoyment out of an object that you never expected to get enjoyment from, because it makes you smile when you look at it, or it's fun to touch," he says politely. "So it's not that it just looks beautiful, but when you actually interact with it, it makes a chore a little less of a chore. Who wouldn't want that?"
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